It seems that currently the gallery app is trying to load pictures from the whole home folder.
This is something I don’t want to happen as it did load all the fan art from the music folder which makes gallery almost useless to browse camera pictures.
Now I’d like to setup the gallery in a way that only preselected folders by me would be loaded into gallery, any ideas how to do this?
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Not really an answer to your question. But if you cannot work out how to do what you want, you can blacklist certain folders.
Any folder with a ‘.nomedia’ file will not be indexed by the tracker, and thus won’t show up in the gallery app. The file can be empty, just needs to be called .nomedia .
Thinking more, this will prevent the tracker from indexing your music as well. So no good for your cover art. Sorry.
Hope you can find a way to whitelist.
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ok, that’s somehow an option but then wouldn’t this also restrict indexing music?
Yes lolek, it would, so no good for you. Sorry.
no worries, hopefully someone will provide some information for fixing this issue.
You could try ImgOrganizer from TpLabs. The app is able to search for images only in folders selected in the settings.
You can find the app on openrepos.net or in Storeman.
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You could also try the following.
Do not save the cover art as a jpg file in the album folder, but embed it in each individual music file.
Then the media tracker should not find them, but the player should recognise them.
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that’s not a viable option for most people
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@silta so you’re saying that the original Gallery app is broken and I need to use a third party app for this? Well, then it seems a bug report has to be created.
No, I’m not saying that the original gallery is broken. It just doesn’t offer the possibility to define the folders to be searched for images.
It is not a bug, it is a missing feature.
So a feature request is the right way. But I’m sure, it will not be the first one 
well for me it’s a bug when I see in gallery images that are fan arts and I have to scroll a lot to find picture I made.
Maybe the gallery should separate this info folders and not put everything into “one big bag”. Say that folder of Pictures, folder of Music etc dunno. But how it is right now it’s - using light work - problematic.
I wonder if that’s not more of a tracker topic.
Afaik gallery, media player, document apps are relying on indexes produced by tracker…
Tracker can be told not to scan a folder by placing there a file named .nomedia .
I don’t know if it can be more selective.
do we have source code for tracker?
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ok, based on the info from this bug report:
As you can see, tracker config has exact paths specified to scan. This is good but there’s no way to say which directories to scan for which kind of files.
In this case probably it would be best to specify this inside of the tracker so allow tracker config which specify which directory contains which data, for example: audio would contain: &Music but images would contain: &Pictures, and video would contain &Videos.
Then gallery will only use entries that are scanned from the Images path.
Imho this is even better as there doesn’t need to be any special easy for user config. This can be something that someone can configure using cli.
@remote that may be, but it is a permanent solution. The folder view and the selection of the folders to be displayed in the gallery is an old story.
As you can read in this thread from december 2013, it’s more than eight years old.
Please see the most voted answer by @roboro from April 7 2014 and the following comments.
I did the work then and have a permanent solution to this day.
I’m afraid if @lolek doesn’t want to wait another eight years, he’ll have to do the same work or he’ll be happy with another gallery app. Unfortunately.
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May i ask where the config files for the media tracker are? I’m curious and want to have a look into them…
oh my… this is just ridiculous. So many peoples asked and voted for this and it’s been so many years and still not fixed, oh my. Thank you for sharing this!
so it seems based on that docs, the problem is not with tracker as it’s just a “stupid indexer”. It’s the Gallery App that’s not handling/not providing enough settings and which must be fixed.
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Isn’t the indexing problem, that the tracker should not scan the whole device but only some predefined ones, the main problem here?
Surely, the ‘bulk’ display of all pictures in one big sausage is another one…
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