Linux troubleshooting

Linux troubleshooting

If you’re having problems with PhotoStructure on Linux, you’re in the right place.

🧊 Frozen or slow file dialogs

On Ubuntu 23.04+ (especially 24.04), file Save/Open dialogs in Electron, Chrome, and Firefox can freeze for seconds or even minutes. The window manager may show an “Application not responding” prompt.

This is a known Ubuntu bug caused by xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, a GNOME service that handles file-chooser dialogs for sandboxed and Electron apps. It has a memory leak that progressively degrades performance. Dialog open times grow from instant to 10+ seconds over days of uptime.

Several factors make it worse:

  • Multiple drives or mount points (each gets enumerated on every dialog open)
  • Many GTK bookmarks in the sidebar
  • A large ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel file (thousands of entries)

PhotoStructure desktop edition

Starting with the next release, the PhotoStructure desktop app bypasses the GTK file chooser entirely. Downloads (sync reports, log archives, diagnostics) save directly to your Downloads folder with no dialog prompt.

The download path is read from XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs (the XDG user directories standard), falling back to ~/Downloads if unset. To change where downloads land, edit that file:

# Check your current setting
grep XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

# Example: change to a different location
# XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/my-downloads"

No other action needed. The fix is automatic.

Node and Docker editions (browser access)

If you access PhotoStructure through Chrome or Firefox and your browser is configured to “Always ask where to save files”, you’ll still hit the GTK file chooser. Two options:

Option A: Disable “ask where to save” in your browser settings. Files will go straight to ~/Downloads.

Option B: Remove the broken portal service. The xdg-desktop-portal-gtk package provides the same file-chooser functionality without the memory leak:

# Remove the buggy GNOME portal (keeps the GTK fallback)
sudo apt remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

# Prevent it from returning via updates
sudo apt-mark hold xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

# Restart the portal service
systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portal

You can verify the fix by checking memory usage before and after:

# Before: xdg-desktop-portal-gnome typically shows 100-400 MB after a few days
systemctl --user status xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

# After removal: xdg-desktop-portal-gtk uses ~2-5 MB
systemctl --user status xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

If you’d rather not remove the package, restarting the service resets the memory leak (but the slowness will return over time):

systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Clearing recently-used entries

If your ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel file has thousands of entries, it adds parsing overhead to every file dialog. Check its size and clear it:

# Check how many entries you have
wc -l ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

# Clear it (GTK will recreate it on next use)
rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

References

🩺 Health checks

PhotoStructure runs health checks regularly. Open the About page from the navigation menu to see their status. If you don’t see all green checkmarks, the messages should point you in the right direction.

If something seems wrong, please post to the forum. We’re happy to help.