Windows 8 not showing your content in Music, Photos and Videos Apps

I recently upgraded to Windows 8 and have found it strange to get used to, from the Win + I to bring up options for apps to getting used to not having the start menu. However the biggest problem I had was opening the My Music, Photos and Video apps and it not showing ANY of my content. I'd read other users having this issue, but with NAS and other network shares etc but mine is stored on a separate local SATA drive. My Libraries were set to view this information and selecting my Music Library showed all this music that I couldn't use in the My Music app.

There is however a way to fix this! The Music, Photos and Video apps not only use your Libraries to gather media data, it also uses the Windows indexing tool. Now considering my media was on another drive and a while back (for whatever reason I cannot actually re-call) I had disabled the Windows Indexing from looking at my other drives so when I upgraded from Win7 to Win8 this area had never been indexed. So I went into Control Panel>Indexing Options>clicked on Modify and selected these extra folders. I then went into Advanced and kicked off a rebuild to hurry things along and start fresh.



After a while of indexing I opened my media Apps in Win8 and the content was all there! Now once you open these applications they begin to then load up previews and thumbnails etc so again once you open the application you must wait a little while (my music took an hour to fully sort itself out) however once its all done everything is there in all its glory. No registry hacks or anything like that, just a slight tweak to what you want indexing. I think I still prefer how Zune works to the new My Music app as I can see much more, however I'm sure it (along with Windows 8) will grow on me. Now time for a beer or a lovely little glass of Glayva to celebrate ;)