Windows 7 My Pictures

[LynSummers]

WHEN I AM IN MY PICTURES IN EXPLORER (WINDOWS 7) IN ADDITION TO EACH PICTURE IN A FOLDER THERE IS A SUB-FOLDER WITH TWO COMPRESSED VERSIONS OF THE PICTURE. HOW DO I GET RID OF THESE? IF i TRY DELETING THEM THEY COME BACK NEXT TIME I OPER THE FOLDER.

 

[Saltgrass]

I seem to remember something about saving thumbnails with the photos. Can't remember if this is a Windows activity or something else. I will have to do some research.

How did you put the pictures on your system?

 

[LynSummers]

Hi, These are not thumbnails they are compressed versions of the photos typically at 12 KB and 64 KB - as if they are ready for uploading.

They are not on the older photos, but when I open a directory of older photos something somewhere runs a compression and the new directories appear. If I delete them they appear again when I open the directory. All ways of putting photos in result in this - downloaded from camera, scanned, downloaded from memory stick.

But you have now got me thinking about Windows Live Mail - perhaps that is doing it - in preparation for possible upload to email?

 

[Saltgrass]

I don't have much experience with live mail, so I can't address that possibility.

We did some testing once with Adobe because the shortcuts for .pdf files were not showing as thumbnails. I believe it was the x64 Windows 7 version, but not sure, the thumbnails would only be created when you opened a folder with those files in it. Maybe in your case, the same type of thing is going on, except not thumbnails but a compressed version of the photo for other uses, as you suggest. If not Live Mail, possibly some other photo editing or viewing software. Since I have not seen the behavior on my system, I could only guess.

You might check any sharing settings in case a multimedia utility is getting them ready to share or stream, like a slide show. If you check the properties for the folder, or the parent folder, does it say anything about what the folder is optimized for? I suppose if it is optimized for photos, you would see small copies of the pictures in the folder icon.

I have been trying to think of something you could watch to see if any activity showed up, and all I might suggest is to watch Task Manager to see if the CPU usage shows on one of the Processes. If you were to notice a process becoming active at that time, we could pin it down.