Copying/Moving for Large Image Folders -> Alternative suggestions for Destination chooser #57102
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I first want to say that Nextcloud is an amazing project — I’ve been following and using it for years now and really admire how it continues to grow and improve. So please take the following comment in a very supportive spirit.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
It’s currently undoable to move large sets of image files into another (large) image folder due to the way the destination chooser loads previews.
Context:
Destination folder: ~270 GB of images
Source folder: ~45.5 GB of images
The workflow is straightforward — open a folder, select images, click “Move or Copy”. Then the destination chooser opens, and when I select a target folder, it starts loading thumbnail previews for the entire folder.
Unfortunately, for very large image collections, this becomes a major bottleneck. The interface tries to render all previews from the target folder, which leads to extreme memory and processing load in the browser. Eventually, the tab becomes unresponsive, and the only choice is to close it. Even when all previews are pre-generated (using the “Preview Generator” app), the browser still consumes too much RAM simply due to the volume of image data.
Describe the solution you'd like
A simple way to improve this could be:
- Add pagination or lazy loading in the destination chooser, or
- Provide an option to disable previews entirely in that dialog.
This would make large-scale file management operations much more feasible, especially for photography or archival use cases where folders can easily reach hundreds of gigabytes.
Describe alternatives you've considered
I looked into the issue and actually code-wise the https://github.com/nextcloud-libraries/nextcloud-dialogs and particularly the FilePicker UI are responsible for this.
A simple UI improvement will make a tremendous difference.
Additional context
I know this topic has been raised in a few threads already, but those discussions often went stale or focused mainly on configuration tweaks. I’d like to approach it from a more fundamental, solution-oriented point of view.
Thank you again for all the great work on Nextcloud — it’s an incredible platform, and I hope this small suggestion helps refine the user experience for heavy media users.