Save Time by Excluding My Music and My Pictures from Avast Scan?

[J Walker]

I have several GB of music and pictures on my computer which take time for Avast to scan.  The music is downloaded from Napster so I am not worried about a virus when it is downloaded.  The pictures are from my own camera.  Is there a significant risk in not regularly scanning these files with Avast?

[DavidR]

Well some music file can be infected mp3 I think, but mostly it is the medial players that are exploited, so it is important that you keep it fully up to date.

Image files can also be infected and .jpg is one, the most common for non-slr professional digital cameras. It is possible that your SD card in the camera could get infected and I don't know if that could subsequently infect the .jpg files. If you scan them after you transfer them to the HDD folder, you could exclude that folder from on-demand scans, as avast by default would scan .jpg files before they are opened (because there is a risk of them being infected).

I would suggest that you only run a Standard sensitivity scan (which only scans file which are at risk from infection) and without archives, this should lessen the scan duration with limited risk.

[bob3160]

I have several GB of music and pictures on my computer which take time for Avast to scan.  The music is downloaded from Napster so I am not worried about a virus when it is downloaded.  The pictures are from my own camera.  Is there a significant risk in not regularly scanning these files with Avast?

As long as you scan the folder at least once and subsequently scan any new additions as they are added, This is in deed a time saver.
As David already mentioned, certain media files can be infected and therefore they shouldn't just be totally omitted from any scans.