Setup
- TS-253B, 8Gb, QTS 5.2.6.3229
- Single Port Network
- Drives (RAID 2):
- WD80EFAX-68KNBN0
- WD80EFAX-68LHPN0
- ~421k actual original media files on disk, ~2.5M photos in Multimedia Console
- PhotoPrism running in Container Station — it generates and stores its own thumbnail cache
- QNAP Multimedia Console (media indexer + myconvertserver thumbnail/transcode daemon) + QuMagie (which depends on the Console’s index/thumbnails and adds its own face-recognition AI)
Symptom
After every restart the Multimedia Console starts indexing and never finishes. The image count in QuMagie does not fall — it stays huge and keeps churning. myconvertserver and the media scanner sit at high CPU indefinitely. System load climbs past ~8, to the point where sshd starts refusing new connections.
What I think is happening
The Multimedia Console is indexing the thumbnail/cache files that PhotoPrism generates as if they were new media. Every PhotoPrism thumbnail becomes another “photo” for the Console to index and generate its own thumbnail for — which lands in a folder PhotoPrism/Console then sees again. The result is a self-feeding loop that never converges.
The smoking gun: my media DB holds ~2.5M entries but there are only ~421k actual original files on disk. The ~2M difference lines up with PhotoPrism’s generated cache/thumbnail files being swept into the Console index.
(Context: in a previous session I relocated the Multimedia Console thumbnail cache to a different location, which may have made the Console re-scan and compounded this.)
What I’ve observed / tried
- Restarting the Multimedia Console / QuMagie — indexing just resumes, count doesn’t drop.
- Confirmed two thumbnailing engines running in parallel (Console myconvertserver + PhotoPrism), plus two face-recognition passes (QuMagie AI + PhotoPrism) competing for CPU.
- set AddAllShareFolder to 0 in /etc/config/medialibrary.conf
Questions for the community
- What’s the correct way to exclude a folder (PhotoPrism’s storage/cache path) from the Multimedia Console / Media Library scan so it stops indexing generated thumbnails? Is there a supported per-share or per-path exclusion?
- Given the DB already has ~2M bogus entries, what’s the safe way to purge missing/invalid entries and re-baseline the media index without a full 2.5M re-scan?
- Is relocating the Console thumbnail cache supported, and if so how do I point it back cleanly so it doesn’t trigger a full regenerate?
Goal: get the Console to index only the ~421k real originals, ignore PhotoPrism’s cache entirely, and let the scan complete once.
Thanks — happy to share config, myconvertserver process details, and log excerpts.