Perhaps my biggest impediment to using Tonido for mobile access to my photos is the time needed to create thumbnails in gallery view for each folder on the fly. Why not have the backend create these thumbnails at the time that the folder is created, so that it's ready to go when accessed via a mobile device? This would be similar to what Western Digital has attempted with its WDphotos app for the company's My Book Live NAS drives. WD's solution, unfortunately, has a backend indexing issue that has prevented me from using it and I have instead turned to Tonido as a potential solution (i.e., the NAS firmware gets partway through the indexing/thumbnail creation process and inexplicably stops).

This could be an option that could be toggled on/off for those who don't need or use it, but would greatly enhance speed for those who do.

The photo resize and thumbs are always done in the backend and they are only done ones (and cached in backend). Furthermore, there is already support in backend to select a folder and do "prepare media" which will do the photo resize in background.

Even if that's the case, the loading of a photo gallery for any particular photo is still slow. The aforementioned WDphotos app stores a cache of the thumbnails on the mobile device so that they're always there and you don't have to wait for the thumbs to load for each folder. It makes it much quicker to locate the photo that you're looking for. Tonido, on the other hand, keeps the cache on the server.

Yes. The cache is not kept on the device. Infact the only data stored in the device are those that you explicitly download. Are you seeing slow load (on a set of precached images) on 3G of wifi?

Thanks for your interest in my issue. I was seeing the reported slowness on WiFi, even on my own network. I heretofore hadn't even tried it on 3G or 4G, but I just did based on your reply and it's about the same speed.

I don't mean to keep bringing up WDphotos, especially because that app has transcoder issues of its own that I've detailed here, but what works really, really well is that process' ability to store cached thumbnails on the device so that they're all there instantly. It allows you to quickly and easily browse folders that have a rotating thumbnail of their own in the photo list to find precisely the image set (and thereafter the specific image) that you're looking for. I'm just throwing it out there as a potential new feature for Tonido, perhaps one that can be toggled on or off depending on the user's needs.