Shame on me - I've missed this thread completely until today...
I've set the item thumb to use the high-res thumbs now because on TFT or other large display devices the former thumbs were looking very ugly - at least in BigIcon view.
Your exif solution sounds very interesting but imho it would be much more useful if the current "patchwork" sort-by-date would be removed and the existing methods would be able to use the exif date to build a view based on that.
For thumbs we're struggling the problem not only in MyPictures and other areas do not provide exif thumbs at all. In addition you already mentioned that it won't be able to replace the large thumbs. Maybe we should better search for a fast 3rd party library that could replace the slow System.Drawing functions in Picture.cs.
Nevertheless great work so far!
__________________  |