My one complaint with Aves is how mind-bogglingly terrible its library management is. It uses a blacklist approach with no whitelist (most other galleries use a whitelist with blacklists on top to narrow down where they search) so it scans your entire device by default, and unlike every other implementation I’ve ever seen, blacklisting a folder isn’t recursive.

That means if you use a different app for video and want to exclude your Movies folder in Aves, you need to manually add Movies as well as every single folder inside of it, plus their subfolders etc, to the list of hidden directories. It also means if you ever add or rename a folder anywhere on your device and it contains media files, it’ll appear in Aves regardless of your previous settings.

And you can’t pick exclusions to add to this blacklist using a file browser interface. No, that would be too easy. You need to go to the Aves tab that lists every single folder with media on your entire device (displayed/sorted by folder name without their path, naturally, so two folders in the same directory might be dozens of entries apart) and manually find all the folders you want to exclude. The blacklist is also displayed in settings showing only the folder names without the path, so good luck checking if that img folder in JoiPlay is blocked when there are twenty other identical entries labeled ‘img’!

I know this sounds minor (and it is), but it’s such a headache dealing with what should be a basic feature of any gallery app. Fossify Gallery may be slower at detecting new media, but at least using it on my gaming tablet doesn’t make me homicidal.