gPhotoShow Products Support Forum

Hello again,

I have a small issue regarding gPhotoShow.

I have a huge slideshow containing a lot of videos and images, together this library is about 8tb's of content.

Now my video and image slideshow library is consolidated over 4 separate hard-drives, most drives are for this purpose only or close to, to hold and playback data of my library for the slideshows.

I used to have 3 drives
X, Y, Z and worked fine back then.

But as of today, I added a small temporary storage drive to catch some of the data overflow that doesn't fit on X,Y,Z anymore, this drive letter is labeled G (Pretty much random, as I can't make a drive after Z, which is a big issue as it turns out today).

Now every time I start the slideshow, the slideshow starts playing from the G drive. It will continue to play from G throughout the slideshow, only every now and then, it plays something from X,Y,Z, but this is a real rarity, and definitely not the way it was working before. Now every time I go to Video and Animations > View files, the files from the G drive are listed first. As the G drive is only a very small drive (233gb), compared to X,Y,Z, which are all 4, 3 and 1 tb drives (so it has more content on it, and gets less annoying when it only plays from a particular drive, perhaps I did not notice the issue before because of this). Anyways this is what my folder structure looks like, and the way I configured it under Video and Animations:

X:\_VIDEO LIBRARY\
Y:\_VIDEO LIBRARY\
Z:\_VIDEO LIBRARY\
G:\_VIDEO LIBRARY\

(Note the g drive which is listed last, does this influence anything, whilst scanning?).

I don't use folder weights for Videos and Animations, only for the image section.

Under file options I have checked the following boxes, which did work flawlessly before:
> Save files list between sessions (Slideshow restarts from the point where it was interrupted, images are not repeated)
> Enable background files list synchronization
> Create displayed image list

When I deselect all of these options, the problem still remains...

Usually, after I perform major maintenance on these drives (moving files/folders around, consolidate stuff together, reorganize it, add or remove files/folders etc etc) I go into the particular slideshow I want to run, and press the "Clear Cache" button, under File Options, and run the Slideshow to see it's results, which is usually really satisfying for me after this routine, a moment to relax and watch the work you've just done .

I've had the exact same issue before where it would constantly just display videos from 1 particular folder, and found that after renaming the folder (to move it alphabetically to the end, saving to a new slideshow file, rebooting, and restarting the slideshow many many times, whilst, letting it scan for hours and hours) the problem finally went away somehow.

However unfortunate, this time I cannot seem to get it fixed, and was wondering if it's me, or that this is pretty common when dealing with large content libraries.

I have a descent computer too I believe
Windows 10
i7 8086K
16GB Ram
SSD
Etc

I use 3 screens, and with the help of "Filter" I usually display only images (most of the time nothing fancy with photowall, just 1 image on screen 1 and 2, every 5 seconds or so) and on the third (Which is a television) I display video as a television system.

After I start the slideshow, I get a balloon dialogue, that says: "Background directory scanning has been enabled gPhotoShow will display a limited number of images while directory scanning is being completed"

And then after 5 seconds or so it says directory scan completed. But then still only showing from that particular and first drive G. When I don't enable background scan, I get a pop up, when I start the slideshow, listing all the directories that are currently being scanned, when that completes, it still only plays from the first drive.

Any ideas or suggestions, how I can make it stop playing from my G drive only/mostly?

Thanks!

Hello,
I guess you drives contain lots of files, gPhotoShow will probably need a long time to scan and index everything for this reason you are only seeing a small subset of all files.
When performing a background file scan gPhotoShow start displaying images as soon as there is something to display, since it starts from the first folder in list you will mostly see pictures from drive G. If you stop it and restart it will use more pictures but it will use the whole file collection only when indexing is finished. Depending on the number of folder and the speed of the network it could take a really long time.
There is nothing to do just let the program to run until scanning is finished.

Thanks for your quick response!

You are right indeed, it is just taking a really long time to index everything. I ran my screensaver during the weekend, turns out it just takes a few hours to get everything indexed and playing a proper shuffle across all drives. It does work however !

But I am wondering, about the background scanning process.

Once I initiate a slideshow (like clear the cache, file list, etc to reset it) and start it, it will background scan, and will create a file list. But then when I exit the slideshow, and manage my folder structure on a windows level, will the slideshow maintain that old folder structure that it first scanned, and come to the conclusion that those files are no longer there, at the moment it wants to play those, or will it background scan again, re-update the folder structure, and update every video's file path? This is really unclear to me. So usually when I've finished managing my folder structure, I clear the cache, which in turn causes the slideshow to be slightly off during folder scanning for at least a few hours (which is not ideal). Now my main question, is clearing the cache needed when you want a nice cleanly scanned folder and file structure? Or will it update this automatically during next scan?

Thanks!

Cache clearing normally is not required, files no longer present will automatically be removed by gPhotoShow and new files will be detected during directory scan. You should clear cache when you remove folders from gPhotoShow list and don't wish to display files from those folder any longer. In this case if don't clear the cache gPhotoShow will continue to display files from those folder until directory scan is finished.
Background directory scan works in this way:
- If there are files in cache list gPhotoShow starts displaying them (if empty it waits for some files to be available) and scans configured folders
- If directory scan is completed files list is updated (new files are added and those no longer present are removed)
- If gPhotoShow is closed while scan is in progress files list is updated and save to cache.

gPhotoShow has been designed to work with files stored locally so a limit of this process is that every time it starts directory scan from the first configured folder and if it doesn't run for enough time it will never complete the scan of all folders.

gPhotoShow could also load files lists from text files, this would avoid the time needed to scan remote folders but you need a way to automatically scan folders and save the list to a text file