Thumbnail Caching and Indexing

Every kind of resource - a local folder, an SMB share, a cloud account, a PDF library - loads its thumbnails through its own loader built for that source, so a network folder does not wait on the same steps a local one does. Thumbnails pause while you scroll fast, so flicking through a long list does not fight the loader for every frame you pass, and a folder with a huge number of files switches thumbnail loading off automatically rather than grinding to a halt.

After a network resource finishes its regular sync, a background task quietly loads the thumbnails for the files it just cached, over Wi-Fi, skipping anything already loaded - so by the time you open that resource, more of it is ready to look at than what you last saw.

When it is turned on for a resource, the scanned file list is saved after the first look, so opening that resource again restores the list at once instead of scanning the folder from the start. This matters most on a slow network share or a folder with thousands of files, where a full re-scan is the part that used to make you wait.

For a local resource, the app keeps a light watch on the folder on disk. When something changes there - a file renamed outside the app, a new one dropped in - the list quietly updates in place, or reloads if the change is too large to patch, without you tapping refresh.

A second watch looks specifically at the device's own media collection, so a photo the camera just saved shows up in the matching resource on its own.

A folder with hundreds of files loads in chunks instead of all at once, so opening it does not spike the phone's memory. Scrolling through a large folder of images no longer reads files from disk on the same thread that draws the screen, which used to be a common cause of the app briefly freezing mid-scroll.

The paired phone resource on the watch pages the same way: past the first 50 items, a Show more button asks the phone for the next page instead of trying to fetch everything at once.

A file that is truly empty, zero bytes, is recognized before the app tries to decode it: the folder shows its plain file-type icon right away and remembers not to try again, instead of asking for a thumbnail on every single re-scroll. Animated WebP and APNG files, which used to fall back to a broken-file icon, now show a still picture of their first frame instead, in the file list, in launcher folder previews and in the file details sheet.

A resource's file count, subfolder count, and when it was last opened or last synced are written down whenever you browse it, and no longer reset to zero - or to nothing at all - just by leaving the screen or opening a file. A cloud resource records the time of its last sync the same way. See Navigating the Main Screen for where these numbers show up on a resource's card.

Collections such as All Images or Recent Media are put together on the fly rather than pointing at one folder, which used to make them reload or blink empty for a moment while a copy or move was running in the background. They now stay loaded and steady through a transfer instead of flickering.

Moving through the file list with a keyboard, a D-pad or a mouse draws a focus ring around the current row. Selecting that row - ticking its checkbox - used to make the ring disappear, since selection and focus shared the same highlight; now they are drawn separately, so you can always see both which row is selected and which one focus is on. More on keyboard and remote control: Keyboard, D-pad and TV navigation.

A few small things used to have a chance of resetting when the app updated itself in the background: whether a file was marked hidden or read-only, what kind of file or transfer job a cached record referred to, and whether a copy or move that just finished was reported as done. All three now survive an update untouched - and if a record from before an update ever turns out unreadable, it is quietly dropped instead of making the app stumble.