Camera and Gallery useless with a lot of music on my SD card

V

vinnie vinegar

New member
Hi,

I added around 6 gb of music to my 8 gb microSD card. After that the Camera updates the SD card for 20 minutes initially and after each picture is taken, and the Gallery says "Please wait..." for 20 minutes each time a new picture is added. If I remove the music files the slowdown is almost gone. I still think the Gallery is slow updating, but I can live with a few seconds. 20 minutes between each picture is just insane. The SD card works fine otherwise, and I have tried to reformat on the phone also. Same problem. What is wrong, and is ther anything I can do except for not having music on the phone?

I'm running Android 1.6
 
The speed in which any storage device can read and write is directly affected by used space. Think of it as a computer with a hard drive completely filled. It will become sluggish. My advice would be to ditch 75% of it or deal with your slow phone. Do you really need 6gb of music, try using Pandora or something... less stored = more speed!
 
I understand that it takes longer to read an 8 gb drive than a 1 gb one, but why is it only Camera/Gallery spending 20 minutes every time one file is added? Other apps don't. And why would it have to read all folders on the device? For instance, in my music player I set which folders are containing music which is the obvious way to design an app instead of having it scan everywhere every time. And yes, I need that much music since they won't let me connect to Pandora while on a flight, and that's when I use the music player the most. I used the same 8 gb card in my old Motorola phone without problems like this at all, so this is a weak solution as far as Android goes. I've found a replacement camera app which doesn't have this problem, but I can't find a replacment Gallery app.
 
At the end of the day the device you are complaining about is a PHONE. when I travel I carry my netbook for movies and my Samsung mp3 player... if you are listening to your music on it I do understand. But why are you taking pictures while listening to music on a plane? And also if you are flying for the amount of time you would listen to 6gb of music you would need a charger wouldn't you? also if you are traveling for business I would assume you have a laptop you carry as in the contrary if travelling for vacation you would have a camera to use and wouldn't next to use extra functions anyways. As well it may depend on the device you are using and its processor speed. My advice, slim down your SD card... even as an experiment just load a gb of music instead of 6 and try to see if that changes
 
Not entirely true... Solid state disks don't have the access time problems associated with moving disks like hard drives. So as they fill up, fragmentation does not slow them down at all. So in this respect it's not true that as an SD card fills up it slows down.

HOWEVER, the media scanner does run on Android whenever you save any media to the SD card. The Media Scanner searches for all media files on the SD card and saves details about them (e.g. dimensions of the pic, thumbnails of pics, album and artists of MP3s), so the more media files you have the longer it takes.
 
Personally I really think there should be some options for the media scanner, at least where to scan for media. Why would one even need a 32 gb SD card when filling it with media makes it impossible to use the built in camera? I am now using a third party camera application and a third party picture viewer. That takes care of the problem for now. I simply couldn't live with having to wait 20 minutes between pictures.
 
If this is the case then Android might now be for me since it would be a step back from my old Motorola Hint which was a great music player, could take pictures and store them even with a lot of music on he card and worked as a phone as well. If I have to "slim down my SD card" I am rather going to leave Android until this problem is resolved, or try to find a fix. Looking around I am not the only one thinking this is a problem. Take a look at this thread which may offer a solution

http://is.gd/f6X1F

I'm off to try that now.
 
Thanks. I've tried that also. I made /music then moved to /media/music and finally /media/audio/music. No joy. I even tried to rename it .music which actually solved the problem except for the fact that my music player then didn't see the music!

Please note that the only problem I have is with the camera and gallery since they insist on checking everywhere between each picture taken unless I take them successively without looking at them in the wiever. If I do I'm getting the dreaded "preparing SD card..." message blocking me from taking more pictures until it's done 20 minutes or so later.
 
My card is a class 6 Trancend. It's very fast on other phones I've used. I have looked around some more and there are a lot of people having this problem with Camera/Gallery. Here's one example:

"I have the exact same problem except with 10 gigs of music, i did tonz of research, its the way gallery has to rescan the sd, hence the long time it takes to load. Horrible flaw, so i found 2 apps ur gonna love. JustPictures and camera magic (sometimes this need to rescan the whole sd card made the camera app show a constant ?preparing sd card ?). They both have no lag, no issues, try em"

I now have Camera Magic and JustPictures! installed and they work great. Camera/Gallery in Android is flawed in this regard running media scanner between every little operation. Thank you for trying to help though!
 
You could also try adding an empty file called .nomedia to you Music folder. That will stop the media scanner bothering with that folder.

You can find instructions how to do this on page 2 of this thread (it's not that easy to make file called .nomedia in windows): http://rabroad.com/forums/f3/htc-desire-users-help-each-other-36375/
 
I tried to rename the music folder .music, but then the music player wouldn't scan it. I tried another music player where you can set your music directory and it did scan music, but ignored all the files. I will try to put a .nomedia file within the music folder and use the player where you can set the folder the player scans.

I do not have Windows since I use Linux exlusively (which makes a lot of what Android does quite familiar to me). I can easily manipulate the files on the SD drive and create the .nomedia file.

I got one good thing out of this: Installing the startup manager and being able to disable quite a few services I do not need like mail (I use K-9), gmail and a couple of otheres. My phone runs smoother after disabling those.
 
So you did get some sort of resolution. Just an FYI, My galaxy s scans once at boot up and I can take pics back to back to back like a multi shot camera... just to test I shot about 100 pics within a min or so... just kept hitting the button... no lag even with media running... no lag here... maybe your running out of resource/device capabilities more than anything.. what processor is on your device?
 
This is not a processor issue. Third party camera's and picture viewers do not have this problem. It's only the built on Android Camera/Gallery app.

I added 1,000 pics to the SD and the scan took a couple of secs (after having removed the music first of course). It's when it's a lot of music is present it slows down, maybe because it scans metainfo for the music files as well (mp3 tags)? However, the main question is why on earth does the Camera/Gallery need to scan music files? Not only is it time consuming, it's battery consuming a well. My old Motorla phone had a much lower end processor than this phone and did not have problems at all with the exact same music collection on the exact same SD card.

And no, I did not find a solution, I found a workaround using other apps than the Android ones. I'm sure this will be fixed at some point since it's a flawed design. Until then I'll use other apps or wait for someone to come up with a way to stop Camera/Gallery from scanning everything every time one pictures is added.
 
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