How do I scan new photos?

[Ozzono71]

Hi, everyone. I've scanned my external hard drive, which contains more than 150,000 photos. My question is this: When I add new photos to my hard drive, will I have to scan it all over again? Is there a way to have it scan only the new photos and catalog them? Thank you very much.

[wmorin]

No, you don't need to scan everything again. Lap already handles this incrementally, and in most cases you don't have to do anything.

Each time Lap starts (and when you switch library), it runs a background check over every folder it already knows and compares the folder's modification time with the one stored in its database. Only folders whose mtime changed get synced, so a drive with 150k photos and a few new folders only costs work for those folders. Opening a folder in the app also triggers the same sync for that folder. Since v0.2.3 this detects new, modified, deleted and renamed files.

If you want to force it, right-click the album in the sidebar (or use its "..." button) and pick "Scan album". That is also incremental: files already in the database are skipped unless their modification time changed or their thumbnail is missing, so only the new photos get thumbnails and metadata extracted. Right-clicking a folder inside the album also gives you "Refresh subfolders", which only updates the folder tree without rescanning media.

One caveat from the README: organization stored only in Lap (tags, ratings, collections, etc.) can get disrupted if you rename, move, replace or copy files outside Lap, so do that inside the app when you can and keep a backup of Lap's database (Settings > Storage).

Source: https://github.com/julyx10/lap/blob/main/src-tauri/src/t_utils.rs (start_folder_mtime_sync / sync_dirty_folders_by_mtime)

[julyx10]

Thanks for the reply. Your explanation is very clear.

[Ozzono71]

Thank you so much for the brilliant explanation 😌🙏🏻