Workaround: Prevent unwanted media file downloads in Smart Sync mode (Windows)

[FrostyFeeted]

I wasn't able to find a solution for this initially in the forums, so wanted to share the solution I came across incase it helps someone else.

Mountain Duck on my system downloads every media file in a directory when I open the directory. For example, if I have a folder with MP3 files, video files, or images in the cloud, and I open that directory locally through a Smart Sync mount, it will immediately download the entire file to the local disk. I believe it does this because it tries to load preview information from these types of media. The problem is that I work with a lot of video editing, and some of the video files in my directories can by many gigabytes big, so it makes it almost impossible to browse an offline directory, and almost made Mountain Duck unusable for me.

Integrated mode may not have this issue, I'm not sure, but integrated mode only allows you to write your cache file to the boot drive. I have C drive as my Windows system, and then all my data on D:, so Integrated mode is essentially not useful, either.

The solution I found is a tool called ShellExView. It's free, very simple, and it allows you to gently disable the Property and Preview Handlers in Windows. What this means is that it prevents Windows from asking the file for information like preview image, bitrate, track length, and other information that's inside of the file that triggers a full download when queried.

Download ShellExView, sort by type, looking for property handlers and preview handlers for the specific media types: mov, mp3, avi, etc. Just disable those. This solved the problem completely for me, and also sped up Mountain Duck's local browsing a fair amount, since it stopped triggering calls to download from the server as I browsed.

Hope that helps someone else. If I hadn't figured it out, I would have had to give up on the tool.