If you’ve got a phone (and yeah, you do), you’ve also got a ridiculous amount of photos—hundreds, even thousands. The problem starts when you plug your phone into Windows and try to open that DCIM/pictures folder in File Explorer. Windows loves to choke on big photo folders: it slows down, freezes, sometimes the window just crashes and disappears. I show what it looks like in real time—the file count keeps climbing, thumbnails load forever, and everything becomes a laggy mess. Switching Explorer to “Details” view helps a bit because it stops focusing on thumbnails, but it still doesn’t fix the core issue when you actually try to copy a huge batch. My solution is using a proper file manager: Total Commander. It’s the old-school dual-panel tool, but it absolutely destroys Explorer for this job. I pick my phone storage on the left, my PC folder on the right, and I’m instantly inside the photo folder—no waiting for thumbnails, no nonsense. Then I select what I want (by date, using Shift + arrow keys) and hit F5 to copy. The big reason it’s faster is simple: Total Commander isn’t wasting time loading thumbnails or doing Explorer.exe indexing/refreshing, so transfers stay smooth and Windows doesn’t freak out. Use Total Commander or something similar (like OneCommander)—the goal is the same: copy thousands of photos fast, with no freezing.