Speed Up Your N82 Gallery - Separation of Videos and Images Makes For A Better Experience

Hi guys, Aaron here again to share some quick tips for your n82. I know most of you may not find this post very helpful, but if you're like me who stores lots of media files on my phone, this tip is very handy.

The N82 maybe one of the fastest phone to date, but if we have hundreds of pictures and several video files stored on it, the gallery application becomes somewhat sluggish and takes like forever to load. I had this problem before, my gallery takes more than 10-15 seconds before the 'Opening..' dialog box let me access my media files. On a fresh reboot, it would take even longer. And it wont't respond to any key presses until a second or two. This is very irritating, especially when I need to take a look on some picture of notes or documents I need for reference. Also, if my friends want to browse my phone's gallery, I don't want them to wait so long and leave them the impression that my n82 is such a slowbro. In addition, my videos were scattered all over the gallery and there's no way possible to make it filter out videos from images or vice versa.

Based on my personal experience, video files are the major factor that slows down the gallery application. Especially those full length movies that you may have on your phone. If you want to speed up that gallery of yours, you can choose to separate your videos from your images on your N82 (a neat feature that is now implemented by FP2) by hiding them from the gallery. Just set your videos' hidden attributes to true using a third party file manager application like Y-Browser or X-plore. NOTE: Do not rely on setting the parent folder in order to hide several videos. See the Update below. Also, Video Center ONLY displays videos that are located on E:\Videos, and C:\Data\Videos (subfolders are not even scanned). You'll need to move all your videos there so that video center can see them.

Basically, your videos will only be hidden from the gallery, and not from Video Center. So if you want to watch videos, Video Center is the place to go. You can now enjoy browsing pictures on a much faster gallery application. I have 381 images on my phone now and the gallery loads it for as fast as 2-3 seconds (3-5secs on fresh reboot) and presentation is very smooth. Video Center on the other hand don't seem to have any problem dealing with my videos with regards to speed and accessibility. To stay organized, you can create folders to group your videos on Video Center.

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UPDATE 3: A very good find by one of our regular visitors here, Gareth, is that, moving your videos to the 'My Videos' folder on your memory card will do it all (hiding them from showing up on the gallery, and displaying them on video center). No need to set file or folder attributes anymore! It works like charm on my n82.. If this does not work on yours, then check out Update 2 below.

UPDATE 2: (Might not work on some phones. See Update 3) Another solution is hiding the 'Videos' folder itself. This way, no need to manually hide your videos. Even if you record new videos, they will be automatically hidden from displaying on the gallery. But it will not work by just hiding the 'Videos' folder. We'll need to follow this workaround:

1. Make sure that your Gallery and Video Center is not open.
2. Ensure that 'Videos' folder (and any folders inside it) are NOT set as a hidden or system folder.
3. Using X-plore, rename the 'Videos' folder, any name will do. I suggest simply add a few characters on its name. We'll just need to make the name 'Videos' available for a new folder that we will create.
4. Open Gallery > Images and Videos to refresh its contents (to update the gallery from the change that was made).
5. EXIT the Gallery, then back to X-plore, create a new folder on root of drive E:\ and name it Videos (E:\Videos).
6. Set its hidden and system attributes to true.
7. Transfer all your videos from the old 'Videos' (the one that you renamed) folder to this new 'Videos' folder. That leaves the old 'Videos' folder empty.
8. That's it. All your videos are now hidden from the gallery.
9. If you record new videos, they will not be displayed on the gallery anymore. But if you want them to be available on Video Center, you'll need to move them on E:\Videos. No need to set them as system or hidden files.

I also created a video guide for this. Again, make sure that your Gallery and Video Center is not open before starting:

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Well thanks to Feature Pack 2 on newer devices, I don't need to rant anymore about what s60 could have done to make the gallery application more useful and logical.

What do you think? Have you had any problems with your gallery or is it just me? Well you can't blame me, I keep hundreds of media files because friends and relatives enjoy watching them on the phone (sometimes on tv).

It'll be great for me to hear your thoughts. Or if you have questions, feel free to leave a comment.


UPDATE 1:

If your gallery displays several copies of one of your videos or several items with broken icons (see screenshots below), DO NOT delete anything. Or you will lose some if not all of your video files. If im not mistaken, this happens if you tried hiding several videos by simply setting their parent folder as a Hidden or System folder. So those several copies are actually different files (or so the gallery thinks but all of them are linked to only one file, that is the video that was duplicated).





To fix this:

• Undo the hiding process you may have done on your files or folders


• Make sure that 'Videos' folder (and any folders inside it) on your phone and memory card are NOT set as a hidden or system folder.


• Exit the gallery to refresh its contents and then open it again to see if your files inside are back to normal.

If you still experience problems or have more questions, don't forget to leave comment ^^.