help on efficient image loading

I'm writing a program which runs on a specific directory with images, reads them to a Bitmap file and then resize them, and add the resized image to a Bitmap hashmap. The naive code to do this is like this:

Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(flFileArray[i].FullName);
Bitmap bmp2 = new Bitmap(bmp, (int)(nudWidth.Value / nudNumOfPics.Value),
(int)(nudHight.Value / nudNumOfPics.Value));

m_hshBitmapArray.Add(bmp2, GetAvgPixelVal(bmp2));

It's quite simple, but i'm wondering if there is a faster way to do this. Can anyone think of something?

BTW, Im coding on VS2008, but it wouldn't hurt getting an answer for VS 2005.

Why not embed the images into the resource file?

I need to access the images at runtime, so embedding them in a resource file won't help.

Ahh. How long does it take on average right now? How many images will be in this directory?

if i were you i do it like this using multi-threading.

1- Thread1: reading image and resizing them then adding them into the queue
2- Thread2: deguing images from the queue and adding them to the hashmap
3- Thread Safty: i implement Mutex objet for locking on queue or Semaphore if i needed somehow more than one thread enter the critical section of my code.

Threading wouldn't make it faster, the file load can not be avoided, which is a major time consuming call.

My code works quite well, but i need to access thousands of images of various sizes, so every bit of tweaking can be good.
The use of multi-threading is interesting, this way i can load images and compute their avg pixel values "simultaneously" . But is there a better way to load thousands of images and then resizing them? A structure better than Bitmap say? A better method?

i don't think there are any special tweak except multi-threading if it works fine for you in practice.