Photo thumbnails cannot be found

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Steerpike
Starting out
Posts: 43
Joined: Tue Nov 22, 2016 11:39 pm
Location: Bay Area, CA

Photo thumbnails cannot be found

Post by Steerpike »

Yesterday I installed / configured Photo Station on my TS251 NAS. Updated to latest versions. I pointed Photo Station to the root of my image collection on the NAS. On the NAS, I have a few top-level shares, one of which is 'NoEncrypt', with a subfolder 'Images', and that's where the photo collection lives. In Photo Station ('Manage', then 'Folder') I pointed it to 'NoEncrypt'. On the NAS, a days-long process of generating thumbnail images began (and I could see it slowly going image-by-image through the folder structure, generating thumbnails).

On the NAS, in the PhotoStation app, I can view my photos. Each photo has a decent-sized thumbnail. So I wondered where all these thumbnail images are kept. Several posts here in this forum, and elsewhere, suggest they reside in the same folder as the images themselves, in a hidden folder along the lines of '.@__thumb'. Eg - viewtopic.php?t=112274 - "I have a folder created under every folder with photos titled: .@__thumb".

So I went looking, but can't find them - not using the NAS's 'Folder Station' (with 'Show hidden files on NAS' turned on), nor using File Manager (Windows Explorer) in Windows 11 with 'hidden files' turned on. Based on guidance in the thread above, I tried this, in PowerShell (after mapping Z:\ to the 'NoEncrypt' share):
get-childitem -Path z:\ -Recurse -Include .@__thumb -force
- Nothing found.
I then replaced '.@__thumb' with a few names I knew were there, and they were found. I also replaced .@__thumb with *thumb* ... still nothing (other than a few random hits on files/folders with 'thumb' in the name).

So where are these thumbnails, and what do I need to do to make them visible (so I may delete them, if needed)? My preference would be to work in Windows, accessing the NAS share, but I could brush off my linux 'skills' and try using SSH ...

UPDATE - I decided to SSH to the NAS, and sure enough - 'find' found them (find . -type d -name "@__thumb"). So ... I guess I'm on my way to success! Out of curiosity - any idea why the PowerShell command above failed? Do I need a special qualifier for hidden files?

UPDATE 2 - I turned off thumbnail generation and deleted all existing thumbnails using:

Code: Select all

find . -type d -name ".@__thumb" -exec rm -rf {} \;
I'm still curious to know if anyone can tell me how to do this with powershell.

I also tried to turn off photo station as it clearly isn't going to meet my needs; in 'Multimedia Console' there's an entry for "Photo Station" with 'enabled' as a hyperlink, but choosing it simply drops me into Photo Station itself, and there's no 'disable' option. So it would appear to be permanently enabled unless I uninstall it?
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