BQ E4.5 (OTA-10): gallery-app tries to index thousands of files on the SD card, but should not

[Matthias Apitz]

The app gallery did not started anymore in my BQ E4.5, it was just
sitting there and loading .... for hours without coming to an end. I investigated
it with strace and lsof and saw the app was searching through all the
100.000 files (OSM tiles) on my SD card. While the SD card managment app
supports placing a file there with the name '.nomedia' so the SD Card
app ignores all files and dirs below:

$ ls -la /media/phablet/4BDC-71D9/Maps
total 840900
drwxr-xr-x 3 phablet phablet 4096 Apr 7 09:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 8 phablet phablet 4096 Jan 1 1970 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 phablet phablet 0 Apr 4 14:58 .nomedia
drwxr-xr-x 19 phablet phablet 4096 Apr 4 14:08 osm

$ find /media/phablet/4BDC-71D9/Maps/osm | wc -l
129236

it seems that the gallery-app does not honor this file '.nomedia'.

Any idea for a workaround in the gallery-app?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Matthias Apitz (gubu)]

Interestingly, I have in another OTA-10 device the same 100.000 files below ~phablet/osm and there gallery-app don't take care of them;

[Tomas Öqvist (tomoqv)]

I don't know if this is related, but the gallery app on my BQ E4.5 also takes forever to load pictures. I have filed another bug about this here https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gallery-app/+bug/1568286. Some additional information:

Gallery app database is 64 KB

Storage divided as follows:
Used by Ubuntu: 2.4 GB
Videos: 131 MB
Audio: 136 MB
Pictures: 432 MB
Other files: 1.1 GB
Used by applications: 584 MB

Total free space: 2.4 GB

[Gregory Opera (gregoryopera)]

Same here - Gallery is ignoring the ".nomedia" file (which should hide any content in the same directory as this file), whilst other applications, Scopes and web apps do not...

Folders containing ".nomedia" should not have their content shown in Gallery.

--

bq Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition
* OS: Ubuntu 15.04 (OTA-10.1)
* OS build number: OTA-10.1
* Ubuntu Image part: 20160408.4
* Ubuntu build description: Ubuntu 15.04 - armf (20160408-211605)
* Device Image part: 20160329-a9bacdb
* Device build description: VEGETA01A-S23A_BQ_L100EN_2012_160408
* Customisation Image [art: 20160324--36-54-vivid

[Selene ToyKeeper (toykeeper)]

Gallery-app 2.9.1.1312 partially fixes this. It doesn't index new files under a .nomedia marker, but if the .nomedia marker is added after indexing, gallery-app continues to show those files. So, at the moment it is necessary to remove the gallery index database in order to make it stop showing .nomedia-excluded images.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gallery-app - 0.0.67+16.04.20160426-0ubuntu1

---------------
gallery-app (0.0.67+16.04.20160426-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  * Add linker flag to strip gallery-app binary file (LP: #1570616)
  * Add proper ngettext-style plural forms (LP: #1551149)
  * Check MimeType to verify if it's an image format before adding to
    gallery's collection (LP: #1536168)
  * If there is a .nomedia file ignores all files and dirs bellow the
    current path (LP: #1568310)
  * Stop using C++ Content Hub API and use QML one instead (LP:
    #1568857)
  * Use Settings instead of StateSaver to open gallery always on the
    last tab viewed (LP: #1560159)
  * Wait gallery ends collection processing before loading events model
    on picker mode (LP: #1569844)

 -- Arthur Mello <email address hidden> Tue, 26 Apr 2016 23:28:09 +0000