Resco Photo Viewer has been evolving over the last three years and has paralleled the development of Nokia's own Nseries Gallery in some ways. Which makes it unnecessary for anyone with the latter, but a downright 'MegaApp' must-buy for anyone struggling along on the 'old' S60 Gallery. With a Nokia E90, Steve is hit more than most by a sluggish Gallery and has found the speed of the third party Resco Photo Viewer a revelation. And it's got other tricks up its sleeve too....
Read on in the full article.
N series gallery is just as bad really. Its a shame Resco dont to a video viewer so I can stop using it completely.
The Samsung i8510 has the same gallery as Eseries but also has a custom Samsung Album app, which is just as bad as Nseries gallery, so I use Resco on that aswell
I have to say the gallery on your E90 is very slow.
My E71's gallery takes barely a second to show both thumb and full image.
I imagine it is because the E90 3.2mp images are roughly 1MB in size, unlike the E71 which uses so much compression that images are on average barely 400k.
Actually browsing trough the folders on my E71 I noticed it places pics taken with camera in some sort of hierarchy of folders. There seems to be a folder for each month and,inside it, some amount of subfolders with limited images each. I think this way the gallery works smoothly (generating first preview for the few last images).
The feature I miss most, which prevents me from always using this on my N82 instead of the gallery is that it doesn't have high resolution output to TV.
(off-topic: the same comment applies to Coreplayer and Smartmovie)
And the main reason I prefer this over the N-series gallery is that the latter shows _all_ pictures, including those from saved web pages, or some freeware apps.
Nokia introduced a seperate process which caches metadata such as is used by the gallery, which is making a big improvement on speed. (not sure which version this is.. 9.3/9.4 maybe)
Also, having things in seperate folders inproves the speed a lot as a FAT file system becomes very slow when the number of files in an individual folder starts to grow.
The gallery i see in my n95 8gb is one of the worst experiences and nightmare I face with it everyday. I have some 100 odd pics and it takes 3-4 minutes to just load the gallery. Completely unacceptable for a 600$ brick I got....n95 8gb is very slow and frustrating in everyway.. i try my best to support 'open' stuff like having n73, n95, n800 but with their sluggishness and after burning my fingers and pocket i am thinking of shifting to iphone so that atleast i can have something that is fast, good UI and works decently...
chendu and srw985, I'm so glad you said what I would've been blasted for saying. Today's Nseries gallery is unchanged from my N90, which was cool then, but is sad sack now. Most Symbian Freak Nseries users prefer Resco as well. I wished the Nseries gallery supported multiple views, better image resizing, and faster loading. Both the default and Resco apps need better thumbnail management. Right now, when you delete an image, the thumbnail remains in storage, instead of automatically updating.
I, too, noticed how large folders of images load slower. It seems Nokia should employ the technology used by Lonely Cat Games X-Plore to quickly cache and load large folders. Not sure how it works, but its near instantaneous.
I think Nokia should stop developing weaknesses of the OS, such as the file browser, media gallery, multimedia player, task manager, and email client, and instead spark agreements to embed alternative apps instead, like X-Plore, Resco Viewer, LCG Jukebox, Coreplayer, Profimail, and JBak Taskman. It will raise the bar for the next solution, and give better out of the box experience, and should be possible for far under $55 per device in large volumes.
chendu, after reading your comment I restarted my phone (n95 8gb) and then started the gallery to gauge the speed. My phone opened the gallery in less than 10 seconds and I have 712 photos/videos. I think there may be something wrong with your phone if it is taking that long.
With my n95, it took 8 seconds with 608 images. chendu, are you sure you hadn't just copied some new stuff into memory? The gallery app is a bit stupid in the way that is always searches for images, would be much better if it just did what the music program does, that being, you refresh it manually. Would also be good if you could choose which folders to look for images in, but anyway.
If you have all your images in internal storage (real internal, not the 8GB+ internal storage), then it will be much faster. This is because internal storage is often more than twice the speed of MicroSD cards.
When you have more images than you can hold in your internal storage, then the speed of the card itself comes into play. Lots of cards are very slow - in tests deleting files, one card took 10s to delete files and another (formatted identically and with same files present) took 30s to delete the same files.
This is probably why you guys are all experiencing different speeds. You might want to try defragmenting your file system also.. Not so much for block fragmentation like hard disks, because that doesn't happen on a flash device, but directory entries on a FAT file system will benefit from being stored contiguously, allowing them to be read quicker. And since finding/opening files is a large part of the activity of a gallery-type application, it should help.
You can do this by copying all the files off, formatting the card, and then copying them back on. This trick works also for things like web browser caches etc. I think if you even just back up the contents and remove the folder and recreate it, you should see a difference.
Unfortunately, for non-removable drives you will have to backup, factory reset, and restore. It's the only way to reconstruct the internal file system.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. I will check it out. In the beginning I have formatted my 8GB memory twice to find whether that resolves the issue. I use the 8GB memory for smses apart from music and photos. Most of my apps I have it in 128 MB memory.
Nseries Gallery is almost as terrible as the S60 one. It doesn't support folders in the file system structure. FAIL. I've been using Resco since it's early versions and it is fantastic in all respects. The only improvement I would like to see is that the anti-aliasing of images when zoomed in/out is not as good as NSeries Gallery's.