Any Way to Hide Music File Artwork in Photo Galleries?

[Larry 609]

Long story short, I have a Galaxy S9+ and use an SD card to store almost all of my photos and music files (which is a lot of files either way). A few months ago, I must have accidentally given the SD card a permission it wasn't supposed to. Because not long after that, all of my album artwork began showing up in my photo galleries. Naturally, this became a problem because that's a lot of folders added in which aren't supposed to be there!

I primarily use FOTO Gallery as my main app, and luckily I've been able to block all of the folders, despite the time put into doing so. However, ones like Google Photos do not give you an option to block an individual folder, much less an entire folder of the SD directory.

Is there any way to go through SD permissions and potentially block the music folder from being read by any of the photo apps? There doesn't appear to be many recommendations online, and I don't want to block the folder entirely since I do want the artwork to show up in the music player.

Thanks in advance!

 

[B. Diddy]

Probably the best way is to use a file manager app to add a blank file titled ".nomedia" (with the leading period, without the quotes) in the directories that have the album art. If all of the album art directories are subdirectories of one parent directory, you could also just add the .nomedia file to the parent directory. .nomedia instructs the system to ignore those directories when scanning for image files to add to the gallery database. I'm not sure if this would interfere with the music apps when they're looking for the accompanying album art, but I don't think so.

 

[Larry 609]

I'm very surprised, but the ".nomedia" that I created on Notepad appears to have solved this! I had seen the suggestion before, but I also read how people used it and had their music files also become unreadable by their music players at the same time. So in other words, it solved the gallery problem, but caused a bigger one!

But yeah, I put the file in a folder containing the playlists and sub-folders for individual artists. After waiting and looking around, the album artwork is no longer appearing in the photo galleries. And on top of that, the music files appear to still be playable in Poweramp and Blackplayer! Album art and all. I'll keep an eye on it in case it suddenly changes, but it looks like this did solve my problem.

Thanks for your help, B. Diddy!