Hi again. Just to demonstrate the speed up from using Storable, I chopped down the script I mentioned above, so you can see the basics. Just run it in a directory with some jpgs in a subdir called "pics". The first run will be slow as the thumbnails are built, but exit the program and restart. The second run will be very fast by comparison.

#!/usr/bin/perl 
use warnings;
use strict;
use Tk;
use Tk::Pane;
use Tk::JPEG;
use MIME::Base64;
use Imager;
use File::Basename;
use File::Path;
use File::Copy;
use Storable;
use POSIX qw(strftime);
use YAML;

my $photo;#my $photo;
my $image;
my %info;
my @exts = qw(.jpg .png .gif); # list allowed extensions

if(-e 'notebook.db'){
     %info = %{retrieve('notebook.db')};   # direct to hash 
    }else{ make_thumbs() } 

#to see a dump of the db, just put an 1 as an arg to the script
if(shift){print Dump(\%info);exit;}

my $mw = MainWindow->new(-bg=>'black');
$mw->geometry('800x700+100+15');

#setup auto save of storable db
$mw->protocol('WM_DELETE_WINDOW' => sub { &save_it() });
$SIG{__DIE__} = sub { &save_it()};
$SIG{INT} = sub { &save_it()};
$mw->bind('<Control-c>', [sub{&save_it(); Tk::exit;}] );

my $mainframe = $mw->Frame(-background=>'black')
                            ->pack(-side => "right", -anchor => "n",
                             -fill=>'both', -expand=>1);

#fill mainframe with default screen 
setup_pane();

MainLoop;

#############################################################
sub setup_pane{

my $pane = $mainframe->Scrolled('Pane', Name => 'Main Display',
               -width => 1000,
           -height =>1000,
               -background => 'black',
           -scrollbars => 'osoe',
               -sticky => 'n',
              )->pack(-side => "left", -anchor => "n",
                  -fill=>'both',-expand=>1);

foreach my $key ( keys %info ){
            my $image = $mw->Photo(
             -data => $info{$key}{'thumbnail'} );

            $pane->Label(-image => $image, 
               -background =>'black'
                 )->pack(-side => 'top',
                  -anchor => 'n',
                  -fill => 'both',
          -expand => 1,
         );
      }
}
################################################################
sub make_thumbs{

umask 0022;

my @pics = <pics/*.jpg pics/*.gif pic/*.png>;
my $image = Imager->new();

foreach my $pic (@pics){    
            my ($basename,$path,$suffix) = fileparse($pic,@exts);
                    
            $info{$basename}{'name'} = $basename;
        $info{$basename}{'pic'} = "pics/$basename.jpg"; #convert to jp
+g
            $image->open(file=>$pic) or die $image->errstr();

        # Create smaller version
         my $temp;
         my $thumb = $image->scale(xpixels=>100);
         print "Storing thumbnail: $basename.jpg\n";

         $thumb->write(data => \$temp, 
                   type =>'jpeg',
                       jpegquality=>30) or die $thumb->errstr;
         
     $info{$basename}{'thumbnail'} = encode_base64($temp);
    }

print "\n#################endofthumbcreation##########################
+#####\n";

}
###################################################################
sub save_it{
store(\%info,'notebook.db');
print "saved\n";
exit;
}
#####################################################################
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