View Thumbnails Faster on Windows XP

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I am a Digital Scrapbook freebie addict and because of this, I've got TONS and TONS of Digital Scrapbook supplies in my computer. Right now, I've got about 50GB of them. Imagine that! And I'm not yet done downloading the freebies from the past 2 days. Hah!

The Digital Scrapbook supplies I got are of high quality ready for printing, thus, their file sizes don't go lower than 2MB, especially the 12x12in papers I got. And this caused me a lot of problems organizing them. I have tried to categorized them but it's pretty difficult when my computer hangs up on me because the thumbnail previews of all the Digital Scrapbook supplies are too much for it to handle, especially when I got about 4,000+ in one folder.

I needed to tweak how my computer handles thumbnails so I can organize my Digital Scrapbook supplies faster. So, I did some tinkering and found a solution - editing Windows registry. And, I want to share this with you. This will be extremely helpful also for those who want to organize high-quality/resolution photos on their computer:

• Open up Registry Editor.
  Start button -> Run -> type in regedit and enter.
  
  
• Navigate to the following key:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
  
  
• New Entry: ThumbnailQuality
  Click on the Edit menu and click on New. Choose DWORD Value.
  For the new value, enter ThumbnailQuality for the name and press ENTER.
  Double-click on ThumbnailQuality and set a value for the quality of the thumbnails you want to use. It can be from 50 to 100. I set mine to the lowest value of 50 for minimum memory usage.
  
  
• New Entry: ThumbnailSize
  Click on the Edit menu and click on New. Choose DWORD Value.
  For the new value, enter ThumbnailSize for the name and press ENTER.
  Double-click on ThumbnailSize and set a value for the thumbnail size you want to use. It can be between 32 and 256. I chose 32, again for the minimum memory usage.

That's it! After I entered those new Windows registry entries, viewing my Digital Scrapbook supplies on Thumbnail mode is a breeze! Yipee! Can't wait to organize them now.