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The alternative may not be faster. You would have to parse the image file manually. And that is what VB is doing before it loads the image.

JPGs & GIFs being compressed, will be much more complicated to parse.
Bitmaps are relatively easy to determine if they are corrupt or not.
But if you are also talking about icons, cursors, wmfs, emfs, and GIFs then you'd need manual parsers for each of them too.

If you are loading the image into a visible object (like a form, picbox, image control) then that will take more time because VB is displaying it after loading it.