I have a Windows 11 media archive folder containing 5,000+ media files, mostly jpg, mov & mp4. By default, the first time File Explorer opens the folder it reads every one of the files to extract metadata related to when the media was first captured/taken.
This is annoying because it’s slow and the information isn’t stored to be available between reboots; it gets re-read every time the folder is accessed after a reboot.
Is there a way to prevent Windows from doing this? I’ve come across various suggestions that you invalidate the PropertyHandler (in the registry) for the file types being read. But I tried doing that and it doesn’t work — the reading still takes place (not surprising, perhaps, since the suggestions were for Windows 10 and earlier and it’s possible Microsoft changed something in Windows 11).
BTW, I also tried deleting the Date Taken column from that folder’s view and replacing it with Date Created (which is a file system attribute and not embedded within the file’s metadata). But that doesn’t work, either. Windows just seems determined to read the metadata in all those media files regardless of my wishes in the matter… 🙂
