Am I misunderstanding container thumbnails?

17 hours ago17 hr

Hi all,

We have a file for tracking changes and approvals for customer-facing documents. It's mostly for graphic design stuff (ads, banners, etc.) but also press releases, manuals, and the like. The main layout has a container field (stored externally) where the document creator can upload the original digital file for posterity and also to make it easier for someone else to find if they need to. This can be a PDF, Word doc, image, Illustrator file, etc. This solution has been working great for years.

Our new graphic designer recently started adding large image files and came to me saying some records wouldn't load. (Our users all access FM via WebDirect.) When I looked at the file, it seems like it does load the records which have large files in the container field, but it is quite slow. I guessed that it had something to do with thumbnails and FM somehow trying to read the full 70MB file in the container field before displaying. I looked into the settings, and, sure enough, found that thumbnails were set to be generated to temporary storage. Aha!, I thought. FM is clearing the thumbnails and trying to regenerate for each WebDirect session, which is very slow for large files in containers. Well, it turns out that setting the thumbnails to be stored permanently and then revisiting the slow records to regenerate the thumbnails didn't help any. The records still load very slowly.

When I use the dev/inspector tools in Chrome, it looks like the displayed image is in fact a stored thumbnail, given it's size and path (some long, internal FM path - not the path to the externally stored files). So why do records with large files in the container field still take so long to load? I would have thought that WebDirect would only load the thumbnail and not have to touch the actual file unless the user clicked the associated button element to download it. The container field is not set to be interactive (optimized for image/pdf/etc.)

Am I misunderstanding something about how containers and thumbnails work?

Thanks, and may all your files run smoothly! :)