For those that don't know, tracker is the utility that watches for new media and makes thumbnails of new images on your N900. It has been widely cursed and hated for its poor behavior and can cause sluggish response time while doing its thing -- which it tends to do right when you want to use your N900, like when taking a bunch of photos.

There is a configuration file for tracker in /home/user/.config/tracker/ called tracker.cfg. By default it has quite a few comments that can be helpful in deciphering the settings, but i find i'm still not really sure what the default behavior of tracker is. There's also an app called tracker-cfg that lets you edit these settings with a GUI.

There are three categories you can put individual folders into that determine how tracker treats them (please correct any errors here) (Edit: see this later post for links to more complete descriptions):

• crawl - scan the folder only when it is first mounted and index any relevant files
• watch - every time the folder contents change, reindex it
• don't watch - don't ever index the directory

The way these are specified can be a bit confusing, because for example you specify a root folder to be watched (meaning tracker will automatically watch all its subfolders). It's not clear if it works the same way for the other two lists.

I'd appreciate a description of the behavior if anyone understands it. In particular, i'm wondering what the default rule is for folders not specifically included in any lists. and whether the "do not watch" list is for directory roots or just individual directories.

The current configuration on my N900 is supposed to be not watching a specific directory of web images, but i keep seeing them show up in the images listing after rebuilding the database. (tracker-processes -r)

Some of the other options are a bit confusing as well. Is there better documentation for this somewhere?

Thanks in advance for whatever insights you might have on the inner workings of tracker. I'd like to tame it!