The .nomedia Dilemma

This should be part of a larger critique/review of the Android operating system, but since I lack time, here’s one annoyance I’ve found on it.

The plus side is, you can plug the phone over USB and it will act as a USB storage device to the computer, not requiring resource-hogging iTunes to copy files into it. This also works for the music files. Another plus side is, the music player apps can semi-sanely deduce that a JPEG file inside a directory of MP3s is probably the cover image of the album. This is better than having the image embedded in each MP3 file. Or at least to me, preferable.

A cover image, what is that, you ask. Well, you see kids, music used to be delivered on circular 12cm shiny platters inside boxes…

But annoyingly, the music and gallery programs look in the entire SD-card for music (or image) files. So the gallery program shows folders with single files, which are the cover images to each album on my phone.

The internet says, if you don’t want a directory to appear in the music/gallery program, you can add a blank file called “.nomedia” into the directory.

Do you see the problem yet? If I want the cover images to disappear from my gallery app, I can put that file in the directory of music. But guess what else that does? Exactly, it will make the music invisible to the music player.

I wish the programs can be made to only look in certain directories. Not having to search the entire filesystem would also make them more efficient.

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