library scans for home movie/photo collections currently need multiple passes to set thumbnails for nested folders

[Statick 9]

at the moment when scanning a library of home movie/photo collections, any folder that contains media will get a thumbnail image assigned to it, chosen from the media it contains. if a folder only contains other subfolders, and no actual media, then instead it chooses a thumbnail that is already set for one of these subfolders, however it won't do this on the first pass as these subfolders do not yet have thumbnails. the scanner must first scan these subfolders and set thumbnails for them, and be allowed to complete, then you must repeat the entire library scan. this time, these subfolders have thumbnails already set, and so when the scanner scans the parent folder it will see these thumbnails and choose one for the parent folder

if you have many layers of nested folders to organise your libraries then you have to repeat the entire library scan again for every additional layer of folders, in order to get thumbnails to appear on every folder that only contains subfolders. on large folder structures and slow network connections this can become very cumbersome just to get a few icons to appear

think of a folder structure that looks like this : "travel photos\2020\June\Spain\image0123.jpg"

on the first scan, "2020" will not get a thumbnail because "June" does not yet have one, then the scanner goes into "June" and this will not get a thumbnail because "Spain" does not have one, then the scanner goes into "Spain", finds media and sets a thumbnail from the images here, and the scan completes. we still have two folders "June" and "2020" without icons

on the second scan, "2020" will still not get a thumbnail, but this time "June" will see that there is now a thumbnail for "Spain" and will use this. now the scan completes and we still do not have a thumbnail for "2020", we must do a third scan and this time "2020" will see that there is a thumbnail for "June" and will use this.

so this basic structure needs 3 full library scans just to get icons everywhere. with a bit of tweaking, this could all be achieved in a single library scan

I realise that it's important for thumbnails to appear quickly, so having the scanner do a thumbnail check before scanning into subfolders makes sense, as usually there will be media found and the thumbnail can be generated right away. but it's incredibly slow to have to repeat the entire library scan many times because of this. I think the best way to speed this up without affecting anything else would be to do a second, more basic thumbnail check after the scanner has returned from scanning subfolders. at this point, if there's already a thumbnail set then the scanner can move on as normal, if there is still no thumbnail then it can do a second check, but this time only looking for subfolder thumbnails - there is no need to scan for media a second time because we already know there isn't any media here, so this shouldn't slow the scanner down, and there's a good chance that subfolders now have thumbnails set that weren't set before

some of my libraries currently need 4 or 5 passes to completely assign all thumbnails, as these are large libraries with large folder structures for organising, and each pass takes many hours. this could be reduced to a single pass with a simple tweak

 

 

 

[Luke 37116]

Hi, yes this is true, and something we will look at improving in future updates. Thanks for the feedback.