What happens during the first scan

Updated Sep 3, 2026 · 2 min read

Indexing, previews drawn on demand, and why you can start browsing right away.

The first scan does one thing: it indexes every supported file in the source, archive contents included. It does not render your whole library and it does not hash it. Previews are generated on demand instead, for the models you actually scroll past (unless you switch Preview generation to All upfront, which renders every new model once the scan finishes), and duplicate detection is a separate pass you start yourself with Analyze in the Duplicates view, whenever it suits you. Both are heavy reads, and neither should happen to a terabyte-scale library unasked. Meshory indexes the formats it can actually work with (models, images, archives, PDFs and text readmes) and leaves everything else alone; see What Meshory indexes for the exact list and how to adjust it. If the scan finishes but something you expected is missing, Scan issues lists the files it could not read and why.

Sources sync one at a time. If another source is already scanning, this one waits its turn. Its row in the sidebar shows a queued badge until the running sync finishes.

Rendering is the slow part on a big library, so it runs in the background across several workers, aimed at whatever is onscreen. The index appears almost immediately, then tiles fill in as you browse: a quick draft first, refined a moment later.

Can I browse while it scans?

Yes, and that is what the design is for. Browsing, search, and the 3D viewer all work during a scan. A tile without a thumbnail yet is simply one nobody has asked for: scroll to it and it renders. Meshory was hardened against a 3.5 TB, 118,270-model library before it ever shipped, so a large first scan is expected behaviour, not a problem.