speed up opening an image file

J

j.t.w

Hi.

I am not sure where to post this message so, I appologize in advance.

Upon delivery of our products to our customers, our customers sign the
invoice to acknowledge receipt of the products. We then scan all of
those signed invoices and keep them on file on a separate PC (used
something like a file server).

I have a search form that allows the user to look up information about
invoices. I also have a button that automatically opens up the Windows
Picture and Fax viewer and displays the image, which I have working.

Basically, here is the code...
Application.FollowHyperlink "\\OtherComp\ScannedInv\" & strString &
".tif"

Unfortunately, there are a lot of images (approx. 19,000 .tif files)
and it takes about 1 1/2 minutes for the image to appear. As more
files are added, I can only see this becoming more of a problem.
(Note: This is about the same amount of time it takes to navigate via
Windows Explorer).

Does anyone have any suggestions of how I could speed up this process?
Do I have to make smaller subfolders (possibly by months) to hold a
smaller set of files? How do websites handle all of the files they
need to have accessible?

Any and all suggestions are appreciated. Thank you.

j.t.w
 
L

Larry Linson

j.t.w said:
Unfortunately, there are a lot of images
(approx. 19,000 .tif files) and it takes
about 1 1/2 minutes for the image to
appear. As more files are added, I can
only see this becoming more of a problem.
(Note: This is about the same amount of
time it takes to navigate via
Windows Explorer).
Click to expand...

Given you are seeing similar times elsewhere, you likely can't speed it up
with the environment you have, so

Try storing them in another file format, or manipulate them to lower the
resolution... you didn't say what _size_ the files are, or what resolution.
TIFF files may be rather large. (I gather you are not using that approach to
_browse_ to find the particular image, but only to display it once you have
identified it.)

Just in general, here's some (perhaps) useful information about images and
Access:

The sample imaging databases at http://accdevel.tripod.com illustrate three
approaches to handling images in Access, and the download includes an
article discussing considerations in choosing an approach. Two of the
approaches do not use OLE Objects and, thus, avoid the database bloat, and
some other problems, associated with images in OLE Objects.

If you are printing the images in reports, to avoid memory leakage, you
should also see MVP Stephen Lebans' http://www.lebans.com/printfailures.htm.
PrintFailure.zip is an Access97 MDB containing a report that fails during
the Access formatting process prior to being spooled to the Printer Driver.
This MDB also contains code showing how to convert the contents of the Image
control to a Bitmap file prior to printing. This helps alleviate the "Out of
Memory" error that can popup when printing image intensive reports.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP
 
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