Limit Gallery search folders

@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 :wink:

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!

https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/tracker/faq/#how-can-i-control-what-tracker-indexes

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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If you exclude Music, where do you suppose Tracker would find your music?

@Seven.of.nine tracker is doing ok job,
it’s the apps that use tracker output doesn’t properly distinguish between paths so in this case Gallery should not be showing images from Music directory as from what I know tracker is not able deliver types based on directories and since this is Gnome product I’m putting dollars against peanuts that it won’t be fixed/changed/improved in this regard.

there’s just has to be a config file, that a user could edit
I don’t really know why J always tends to hide every config from a user, while also stating that it is not a locked-down android phone.

Not cluttering up the gui != actively hiding.

well then there’s one more OS I can think of that’s even more limited.

Whatever, the functionality is broken as it is now and it seems that its broken for over 8 years. So if one doesn’t want to “clutter gui” then it should work as users expect so they won’t file so many complains.
The problem here is that Sailfish OS is not a bad OS but as I mentioned many times it’s still long way from being out of a beta state.

My point exactly.  

Nobody asks to clutter the gui.
Everybody asks that at least they have a config file in /etc so that power users can edit it.
But no, they will hard-code everything and have 0 documentation on internals.

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