digikam partially missing thumbnails from external drive

Software digiKam
1

I have started converting my photo management to digikam (after many years) again… due to a move to Linux.
Everything works well… bar one thing.
My collection is large (>100k pictures) part raw part jpg… Because of the size, they are on an external backup drive (I have another copy in the cloud). When I now disconnect the external drive… some thumbnails show and some do not. It’s about 50/50… and very unclear why some show and some do not.
I have also already used a thumbnail maintenance but no better result.

Has anyone experienced this? Is seeing the collection when external drive is removed simply not possible? Since the database is on the internal SSD I was hoping that would work.

2

was your collection always on the backup drive? are there any pictures in the default pictures directory? When you disconnect the external drive, are you unmounting it first before physically disconnecting the drive?
Unmounting will make sure the buffers are flushed and all the data is written to the disk and the files are closed.
When you reconnect the drive are all the thumbnails showing?

3

I think I resolved it. I did another full thumbnail scan with the external drive attached… and now the thumbnails are showing as expected. Let’s see whether another couple of rounds will stick…