gallery app starts very slow

[guru]

Since ages the galery app in my BQ E4.5 takes a lot of time to start, around 20 seconds. Today I got to know why:

I have on my SD card mounted to /media/phablet/6464-6631 some thousands of PNG files (prefetched OSM tiles) and it seems that the galery app has indexed them, at least they get presented in the app and when I click info for such a file the file name is /media/phablet/6464-663/Maps/osm/18/139636/90931.png (for example). I think the galery app should not crowl down because I have a file /media/phablet/6464-6631/.nomedia there. But maybe I created this file to late.

I looked into the database /home/phablet/.local/share/com.ubuntu.gallery/database/gallery.sqlite and it shows:

sqlite> select count(*) from AlbumTable;
0
sqlite> select count(*) from MediaAlbumTable;
0
sqlite> select count(*) from MediaTable;
11861
sqlite> select count(*) from PhotoEditTable;
0

I stopped the app, made a backup of the database file and deleted all rows with

sqlite> delete from MediaTable;
sqlite> select count(*) from MediaTable;
0

After this the app starts now very fast and indexed only a few real photos and screen shots:

sqlite> select count(*) from MediaTable;
184

Maybe this helps others as well.

[kugiigi]

I think for sdcards, it's quite similar to android wherein you can create a file named .nomedia in directories you don't want do scanned for, well, media

[mihael]

Is there any way to make gallery app not rebuild the index on start up? I am asking this because I have many pictures that I do want in my gallery and it takes about two minutes for the app to start.

[guru]

What should work is this procedure: move these many pictures into one directory, start gallery to get them indexed, then create a file in this dir with the name .nomedia and restart gallery. It should now not re-index the pictures but present them.

[mihael]

@guru Thank you. I did that and it didn't help... I restarted the phone and no change. Maybe there is something else that needs to be done? I appreciate any help, thank you again.

[guru]

Can you look into the database with the shown commands how many rows (i.e. pictures) you have there? Maybe the time is used not for indexing itself but for rendering the pictures into the screen of the app. My number went down from 11800 to 180 and this helped me.

[mihael]

@guru I have 11467 pictures indexed...