Do not create directories on removable drives

[Matthew Exon]

When using External Drives you have the option of formatting a USB drive. This creates a number of media-specific directories: Pictures, Music, Videos etc. The media scanner finds files regardless of where they're placed so there's no particular reason to use that structure. But that's not obvious: it causes confusion as to whether you have to put files in the appropriate folder.

In general, don't make life more complicated for the user than it needs to be. Just format the drive as empty like any other operating system would do.

Related to Bug #1520441.

[Victor gonzalez (victor-gonzalez-0)]

This happens even if you plug a USB drive previously formatted with gparted (for example). Then, once it is connected all those folders appear too.

[Cesar Herrera (chg1)]

The phone only reads some USB memories. When it reads them it creates those directories.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

This is the intended functionality to improve usability when viewing the drive. We can revisit if it can be attained another way.

[Matthew Exon (ubuntubugs-mexon)]

Can you expand on how this improves usability? It's not like content on the drive automatically gets sorted into the correct directories or anything, so you end up with a "Music" directory which is not where the music kept, etc. "Where is my music?" "Ah! It must be in the 'Music' folder!" "Oh, that's empty." "Ah! Maybe it's in *this* 'Music' folder!" "Oh, that's empty too." Frustrating.

If the OS creates content on the card it might make sense for it to create a content-type directory to keep it in. But that should only happen when the content is created, not speculatively when the card is formatted.

Ubuntu desktop does this too of course. So does my Macintosh. And I have never understood why. Those directories have always sat empty on every operating system I've ever used, getting in my way.

[Cesar Herrera (chg1)]

For many people USB memory only is used in few occasions in the phone. This memory after that is used in the pc and It will be strange to see new empty folders created. In any case it is not very important.

[Matthew Exon (ubuntubugs-mexon)]

Just curious, how are you handling localization here? Obviously you can't automatically create a "Music" directory when you insert a card into a Chinese phone, it has to be "音乐". But then if I take that card and insert it into a friend's German phone, is it going to understand that music goes in "音乐", or is it going to create a new "Musik" directory? Not a problem for the directories in the home directory, but a big problem for a mobile card.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Creating these directories on a removable drive is not useful because mediascanner scans the whole drive, discovers and indexes the media wherever they are on the removable drive.