The Pasture

…at least I think. Having been frustrated since I updated my Palm Pre to webOS v1.2, and then 1.2.1, and still having trouble with my photos application locking up the phone, I decided to keep digging around and see what changed between 1.1 and 1.2 that could have caused this.

Although this doesn’t explain a few of the lockups, it does explain the ones I was able to replicate, and I narrowed it down to one file that was screwing with everything…a giant bitmap that was now showing up in the Miscellaneous folder.

With the 1.2 update came added photo formats: PNG and BMP in addition to JPEG. I also happen to use the USB mode quite often to make my Pre into an 8 GB jump drive that I never lose. As a result, I had this huge bitmap file of the cover of my brother’s bike video from about two months ago that I transferred with my phone from my computer to the printing folks.

Once I updated to 1.2, my poor Pre was seeing this file in the Photos app and trying to compress this thing down to a thumbnail view and then animate it as I was going through different folders and pulling up different photos within the Miscellaneous folder. It simply took it a very long time to do so.

I was able to narrow this down when I had a profile picture not update when someone changed their picture on Facebook, so I went to FB on my phone, downloaded the image (another new 1.2 feature) and then went to designate that photo as their profile picture manually… well guess where it puts images downloaded from the web? Miscellaneous, yes. So as I tried to go grab this newly downloaded image, it would encounter that bitmap and nearly die trying to load it.

Once I deleted that bitmap, everything seems all hunky-dory. The Photos app is nice and responsive and the Miscellaneous folder in particular is just fine. I figured since my desperate tweets were seeming to be in vain, and I wasn’t encountering anyone else who was having this issue, it had to be something I was overlooking. It seemed very odd that I could be the only person in the world having this issue :P

So there we go… if anyone else has issues with their Photos app screwing up their Pre, check to see if you have any massive images that it’s trying to load to no avail ;)