Hide files from Gallery Scan

[jostarr]

I have some files in a folder on my external MicroSD card. They show up in Gallery. If I delete them, they show up again the next time the Acer is powered down and then powered up.

I read in another forum that if I were to put a blank file named ".nomedia" in the folder,
it would hide the files when Gallery scans the external sd card on power up. It doesn't work for me.

I am looking for your comments and your experience with hiding files and folders using a .nomedia file.

 

[Icebike]

.nomedia seems to be haphazardly honored by the gallery.

• I put .nomedia in a directory of images on /mnt/images
• I checked the gallery and they were still there.
• Powered down, and rebooted.
• They were no longer visible in the gallery.
• Fired up ES File Explorer and checked in that directory. The pictures were still there.
• I tapped on on picture in ES File Explorer, and it opened in the gallery.
• I exited the picture and ES File Explorer and went to the gallery from the home screen.
• That single picture was shown for that directory. None of the other pictures were shown.

Conclusion: .nomedia is honored on initial scan, but if you ever do anything to force the gallery to view
a picture, it caches the picture, or the location of the picture, and it will know about that picture.

Second finding: Erasing a picture (from external_sd) is no guarantee that it will be will be deleted from the cache. You might still see the thumbnail in the gallery, and upon tapping the picture, you will see gray bands partially or completely covering the image.

 

[wolfganggold]

I really like QuickPic, free on the market. you can configure it to ignore individual files or whole folders. it's very nice because the default gallery retardedly thinks that I'm interested in seeing album art in my music folder and covers in my ebooks folder. QuickPic saw them at first but it just took a couple of taps to exclude those folders permanently.

 

[Icebike]

Your album art problem and your book covers problem is because of a failure on the part of some of those application developers to put .nomedia files where they belong. (Let me guess: Nook is the ebook software?).

If you put/copy an empty text file named .nomedia (note leading dot) in those directories and reboot the album art and book covers won't be shown any more. But as I pointed out, if you use a file manager and force those pictures to be viewed with es-file explorer, they will be cached and shown next from then on, till reboot.

If you put .nomedia in your /sdcard/nook directory you won't see covers.
(OverDrive (library ebooks reader) is smart enough to do this by itself at install time).

 

[wolfganggold]

no, my eReader is Cool Reader. With QuickPic, I don't have to mess with that. It just remembers the folders I tell it to exclude.