Managing files & picture gallery on Android?

[Pia]

So I have a Galaxy Note which is also my first Android phone. Stock OS (with Touchwiz, and Samsung apps instead of Google's) upgraded to 4.0. No SD card.

I manually uploaded some music albums to the phone's filesystem, but they are littering the Gallery, each album's pictures show up as a folder. Needless to say, I don't want to see them in the Gallery. Any way I can fix this, e.g. prevent files from a certain directory tree showing up, or should I be using some better picture viewer than stock?

 

[vshah]

you can prevent media files from being scanned by putting a ".nomedia" file in a directory. however, this will prevent music files from being scanned as well.

try quickpic, i think it lets you hide folders.

 

[Pia]

Thanks! It seems like Quickpic can either create those .nomedia files, or just hide folders from its own view. The latter would work if I'm willing to use only Quickpic from here on.

The way to solve this for the built-in apps would seem to be moving any album art to its own folder inside the music folder - separately for every album! - then sticking a .nomedia file in the album art folder. While googling I also found many references to the .nomedia system being bugged, and having to do manual stuff before the media scanner will respect newly created .nomedia files; that might apparently be fixed in 4.1 OS which the Note doesn't have yet.

All in all, this seems kinda disappointing from Android. They could allow further parameters inside .nomedia files like "pictures=yes, videos=no except .avi", or have a separate configuration file for the media scanner where the user has more fine-grained control over excluding things. Either way, we should be able to just make a single entry and cause the scanner to skip any image format within the music folder.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Gallery is the worst app ever. you can't sort or anything. sometimes i think it misreads my EXIF and then you're screwed. I see pictures out of date. When I copy it to my computer and read the EXIF it's all correct, but the phone tags the date wrong.

 

[Raduque]

I use embedded album art to get around the issue. It's a lousy work-around for sure, but it's one of those little quirks of Android. The media scanner will throw every single media file it recognizes into Gallery. Some parts of Android, sadly, are still for highly technical users that care more about function over form.

 

[Pia]

I use embedded album art to get around the issue. It's a lousy work-around for sure, but it's one of those little quirks of Android. The media scanner will throw every single media file it recognizes into Gallery. Some parts of Android, sadly, are still for highly technical users that care more about function over form.

To the contrary, this is a case where technical function sucks in a fundamental way. The .nomedia files seem like a reasonable solution for letting apps and such keep their internal assets out of the way, and I'm sure that's all they were ever intended to do. But Android should definitely also offer a way for the user to control the visibility of their own files without resorting to ugly hacks. I think Google has neglected to do this because they do not yet sufficiently think of Android devices as computers.

 

[Raduque]

To the contrary, this is a case where technical function sucks in a fundamental way. The .nomedia files seem like a reasonable solution for letting apps and such keep their internal assets out of the way, and I'm sure that's all they were ever intended to do. But Android should definitely also offer a way for the user to control the visibility of their own files without resorting to ugly hacks. I think Google has neglected to do this because they do not yet sufficiently think of Android devices as computers.

I agree with the underlined. But I said what I said because I see it as "Index all the media and let the user put a .nomedia file where they don't want it indexed". You basically run into the same problem with audio. The stock audio players all just read from the media scanner DB, and will happily play your ringtones in with your music.