Hey everyone! We're having a problem at our company where File Explorer becomes unresponsive when users try to browse a network drive containing loads of marketing images stored as .TIFF files. There are thousands of these images, each between 4 and 10 MB. When this happens, we notice network usage spikes up to 70 Mbit/s, and Explorer just freezes for a while before it eventually comes back to life. This issue didn't occur on Windows 10, and we're currently on Windows 11 (24H2). We've already tried a few things like reinstalling PCs, switching LAN ports, and even disabling thumbnail previews in Explorer, but nothing seems to work. Has anyone run into this issue or have suggestions on what to check? We're out of ideas here!
3 Answers
It sounds like a classic case of trying to view too many large files at once. Have you thought about organizing those .TIFF files into subfolders? Using a date-based system like YYYY-MM-DD could help—having thousands of files in one folder might overwhelm Explorer, even if thumbnail previews are turned off. Reducing the number of files loaded at once might ease the strain on File Explorer.
Have you considered using a tool like WinThumbsPreloader? It's kind of a workaround, but it might help you diagnose the issue with loading those big .TIFF files in Explorer. Worth a shot!
Is there a preview feature enabled in Explorer that tries to generate thumbnails or previews on the fly? That can slow things down significantly. You might want to check those settings and disable them to see if things speed up.
I already changed that in the settings, but unfortunately, it didn't help—still takes forever to load.
Yeah, but these images are sorted by article numbers, and we have around 2500 images in one folder already. I’m not sure if splitting them further would help.