I came here this evening to see if anyone else has posted about this.
Obviously I can manually rescan folders myself, but it's not as elegant or complete an experience having to do so and seems like a feature that'd complete "catalogue".
How I'd imagine it working is users would specify folder/s as "active/hot" (as above) and also define a schedule, so that we could choose whether the performance hit is something we want to incur regularly, and when. For instance, I'd set it to run every morning at 4am, on a computer I leave on anyway. If I don't have it on then it'd just pick up at the next 4am when I do have it on. Add a button to force the specified task to run straight away, and I'm good. If you wanted to make it really sophisticated, you could have separate tasks for each collection or "active/hot" folder, specifying to never rescan one collection/folder, monthly for another, daily for another etc. Although I'd be content with the basic single task, I can see value in building in the feature of separate tasks as a future upgrade.
I know nothing about how to programme, so forgive me if this is naive regarding how much resource it'd take. I presume it'd record the last time a scan was carried out and then scan for anything that was added or modified since that date, to only update the database with those files modified since? I've found the scan process impressively fast and the database updates that run in the background will only need to crunch the newly modified files, which I can't imagine being an issue for me at 4am, based on how it runs now, so I don't personally think the resource issue is one I'd be worried about, but maybe I'm missing something obvious in this?
Thx