#11 Thumbnail generation takes forever.

[Anonymous]

My SD card was almost full, so I decided to delete a lot of files, cache folders, etc. After that, I opened Open Camera and (after a minute of white screen or so) it opened. I noticed that it had created a 640 MB!! file named .thumbdata3--a_lot_of_numbers_and_letters in sdcard/DCIM/.thumbnails. I deleted it, opened Open Camera again, and it happened the same. The strange thing is that if I create an empty file named like that, it won't grow and it will work fine, showing the gallery icon instead of a thumbnail. I suppose this is created by Android API when you try to put the last photo thumbnail, so maybe you could let the user choose to show that thumbnail or disable it, just showing a generic "gallery" icon.

[Anonymous]

No, it also happens with an empty file, I don't know why it worked last time. It hangs for a minute while generating that huge file.

[Mark]

Hi,

This seems to be standard Android behaviour, e.g., see:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1953326
http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2013/07/how-to-reclaim-1gb-from-your-androids-disk-space.html
http://www.thriveforums.org/forum/toshiba-thrive-help/16017-very-large-thumbdata3-files-eating-up-space.html

I could add an option to not display a thumbnail, so have added this to my TODO, but note I don't think it will ultimately stop the problem, as other apps may generate thumbnails and cause it to be recreated.

Regarding the workaround to create a file, this is suggested in some of the links above - not sure why it only works some of the time.

[Anonymous]

Well, at least I know what's the problem...

The thing is, I think the only app I have that uses the default android cache for thumbnails is Open Camera, so if you could add that option it would be great. Thanks for the answer!

[Anonymous]

seconding a request for the ability to disable thumbnail view in the gui. open camera takes a good 40sec to load on my device because there is a lot in my gallery.