[Q] .thumbnails is huge, its growing and coming back every time

Lightbird said:

hello dear members,

i tryed to get rid of the .thumbnails folder (found on internal Storage - DCIM) because its that huge (3 GB) and every time i deleate it it slows down my Phone, the ZU gets really hot and that for about 10 minutes and after that the folder is back again containing all my Photos in a smaller version + an huge file that is as big as all the original Photos on my SD-Card. I would be very happy, if the folder would be history.

Does anyone has this Problem too and would help me, please? Thanks :laugh:.

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If you use the Album app this will happen. The .thumbnails folder has reduced size images of every .gif, .jpg, .mp4, etc type media file on your phone. Not 100% sure if this works but if you create a file " .nomedia " in directories you don't want to show up it will not cache them. Delete the .thumbnails and reboot, bring up Album (I use QikPic instead) and it will re-cache them.

If you have a rooted phone I believe you can use Titanium Backup to disable the Album process. That will keep it from creating the cache but it will also mean Album won't work.

By the way, I have had an instance where the process was running continually and would never complete. The reason turned out to be a corrupted file. I had to go through thousands of pictures to find the one causing the issues. If you see a file that doesn't have a thumbnail that's a likely candidate.

Marc

By removing this folder, your gallery would have black squares and with no chance at getting any ideas about what was what. You can delete the folder, but it'll come right back again once you open your gallery. It's not possible to permanently remove it. The problem here is that you have way too many photos on your Ultra.

I have 279 thumbnails which uses 86MB. You must have thousands of photos, so there's nothing wrong with that folder, it's the amount of stuff you have in your gallery that is the problem. Time to clean it!

---------- Post added at 06:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:11 PM ----------

mknewman said:

By the way, I have had an instance where the process was running continually and would never complete. The reason turned out to be a corrupted file. I had to go through thousands of pictures to find the one causing the issues. If you see a file that doesn't have a thumbnail that's a likely candidate.

Marc

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Yes, that's the media_scanner running wild. But no wonder it takes several minutes to scan when he has thousands of photos on his phone. Move them to your Dropbox instead and use that as a gallery when you want to look at them. No caching or thumbs.