For months I would run across this strange issue where occasionally a folder of images would appear to become corrupt. Because no matter how I tried to open the folder it would crash the program – even just trying to open the folder in the Windows Explorer would crash Explorer (Not Internet Explorer by the way – but the operating systems basic folder opening program).

The folder once it began crashing would crash no matter how I tried to access the photos – if I tried to open an image from that folder in Photoshop it would crash Photoshop. It was real frustrating and caused me to use an ftp program to view the files in the folder than I could click to edit from the ftp program and it would open fine in Photoshop. But this is far from an ideal workaround for a guy that edits photos all the time as part of my webdev livelihood.

So anyway, I found the solution the other day to what was causing Explorer and Photoshop to crash when opening these image folders.

It was a conflict between XP’s built-in thumbnail viewer in Windows Explorer and Photoshop’s “Generate Thumbnail” feature. So to fix you need to disable the thumbnail feature for Photoshop files by:

1. Right-click on any image file
2. Choose Properties
3. Choose Photoshop image tab
4. Uncheck the “Generate Thumbnails” option

This will disable the feature for all image files – and I haven’t crashed since!