PowerToys: SVG thumbnail regression
Microsoft PowerToys version
0.60.1
Running as admin
- Yes
Area(s) with issue?
SVG Thumbnail
Steps to reproduce
PowerToys v0.57.2 generated the SVG thumbnails reasonably fast. However, since I upgraded to v0.60.1 the SVG thumbnail generation is terribly slow. Opening a folder with tens of SVG files takes almost a minute to have all the thumbnails available. The following screenshot shows the behavior in v0.60.1:
On top of that, most thumbnails show a bit of text that appears somewhere in the SVG drawing. It should instead show the whole SVG drawing, like what v0.57.2 did:
✔️ Expected Behavior
Show SVG thumbnails fast. Show the whole SVG drawing in the thumbnail.
❌ Actual Behavior
Generate SVG thumbnails slow. Show part of the SVG drawing in the thumbnail.
Other Software
No response
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: open
- Created 2 years ago
- Reactions: 6
- Comments: 21
@kristofmulier I disabled the powertoys svg thumb and installed the “SVG Viewer Extension for Windows Explorer”, it generates the thumbs very quickly, I think that for now is the only way out, until powertoys has a version with the correction.
https://github.com/tibold/svg-explorer-extension
Just to add to the hypothesis put forth by @KaiHuaDou, I saw (via the “Details” tab on Task Manager to see PIDs) a separate new “PowerToys.SvgThumbnailProvider.exe” process for each individual thumbnail.
My system is also pretty fast:
I use now the latest PowerToys
v0.66.0I notice everyone experiences this issue of slow rendering svg-thumbnails - no matter how powerful the PC. Is anyone working on a fix? I love PowerToys, but this bug is really a dealbreaker.
I’d like to add that during the super-slow rendering, there is a single “COM surrogate” process which appears to be using as much CPU time as is possible for a single-threaded process.
I observed this issue while attempting to render thumbnails for all of the iconoir SVG icons: https://github.com/iconoir-icons/iconoir/tree/main/icons
Windows 11 22H2 powertoys v0.75.1
this issue still remain, slow, 1 svg takes 2-3 second to load
Here’s one hard data point: I’m seeing it take 3-4 seconds to render each trivial SVG (simple icons). This is with PowerToys 0.66.0 on Windows 11, a high-performance CPU, with many GB of free memory, and no other significant simultaneous workloads.
I think this problem may be caused by the conflict between Windows and PowerToys thumbnail policy.
If you bind the rendering thread to the thumbnail handler, Windows will start a rendering process for each thumbnail.
I think the correct approach should be: only one thread is responsible for rendering, and a small and fast program is registered as a thumbnail processing program. This program does not perform calculations, but is only responsible for transferring data. This way it will only start one renderer thread, not multiple ones, no matter how many files there are.
If PowerToys is using the browser engine for rendering, then previewing 100 SVGs will bring about as much performance pressure as opening 100 Edge tabs.
After five months, I still experience this problem. Right now, I have:
PowerToys runs in admin mode:
My current PowerToys settings:
What can I do to make the rendering of the svg-files faster?
PS: It’s slow, even when the SVG files are really simple.