Hi, I am not sure if this is a bug, or if I am doing something wrong. Here is my issue:

I had all my photos in Google photos. I have used the Takeout to download them all to an external hard drive.
I am now extracting them to another folder on the same hard drive - called “All photos extracted”
I have added that folder “All photos extracted” to the Library Locations for Tonfotos.

Tonfotos scans that folder and finds all the subfolders in it (which were albums in Google), and shows the subfolders under the “All photos extracted” top folder. Great. The first time I used it, when I just had a few photos in there , I waited until it had finished scanning, and then could use the options to Delete duplicates etc.

However, now that I have a lot of photos in that folder (500GB/ 280k photos), it never finishes scanning the folder - even after a full day. And if my computer goes to sleep, it seems to lose all connection to the hard drive.

Then when I open Tonfotos, it does not show “All photos extracted” or any of the subfolders under the Folder menu. It is still in the Library Locations, but even when confirming that the hard drive is attached, the folders dont show up in the folder menu. A couple of times I have closed and re-opened tonfotos, or I have done the thing to reconfirm the path for the drive, and that has made the folders come back - BUT when it comes back, it starts scanning again, seemingly from the begnning and repopulating all the folders, taking many, many hours. And again not getting to the end. I could probably reduce the size of the folder if I could do the Delete duplicates option, but I need to wait for it to finish indexing first and that seems to never happen.
And then I am concerned that anytime i want to work with my photos I will need to wait many hours for it to ‘find’ them all again before I can do anything. My plan was to get all the photos in this folder on my hard drive, delete all duplicates, order them, add faces and captions, so that they are organised properly. Tonfotos seems like a good option to do this, but not if it loses all memory of the photos each time the hard drive is disconnected.

Is this how it is meant to work? Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for any help!