Start Browsing Your Archive Before the Scan Even Finishes

Plugging in a drive with several hundred thousand files for the first time is exactly the moment a progress bar becomes the enemy — nobody wants to wait hours before they can look at a single photo. MediaVault is built so you don't have to.

Newest first, on purpose

Scanning and preview generation are ordered by the same effective-timestamp index the Timeline itself uses, newest first — so the most recent year of your archive finishes processing early and becomes fully browsable while older years are still working through the background.

Reads and processing don't block each other

Disk reads and the actual decode/encode work run as separate stages instead of one blocking the other, so a scan isn't limited to however few threads a slow external drive can tolerate for reads alone — decoding scales across your CPU while reads stay conservative on spinning disks.

The headline promise isn't "wait for the scan to finish" — it's that you can start browsing before it does, which matters most on exactly the huge, years-old external drive this app was built for.