[Q] Restore deleted photos, strange problem - Nexus 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hi there, I really need your help!
Whilst setting up an owncloud server and messing with the app on my phone it had somehow created a duplicate camera folder. Now instead of looking in that folder to check photos (they both said they had the same number in) I just took another picture, checked what folder went up in value and deleted the other, STUPIDLY!
So as you can guess, 90% of my photos and vids were in the folder I deleted. I've tried all ways to get the nexus 4 mounted as a drive but to no avail. I used a piece of software called Dr.Fone and it did actually see all the missing photos but upon restoring them most were screwed when you actually wanted to open them (thumbnails were fine) or the resolution/file size was not the same as the original.
Now, if I browse my phone and go to my camera folder I can see EVERY file in there, 10GB worth and all the right file sizes etc. My phone says I have 12gb free space so something is obviously up. I can't seem to copy these over or view them either. Again if I got in to the photos app I can see 95% of the thumbnails fine but they just won't open.
Does anyone have any ideas if or how I can get these photos back as there are lots of my young daughter on there including her 1st birthday party
Quite ironic really that it was the setting up of the backup solution for ours phone that led to this!!!!!!
TIA

Do not take anymore pictures or add anymore files to the disk or you will further corrupt it and overwrite the old ones.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using XDA Free mobile app

Related

Lost photos

Hi all.
Today I noticed that in last 2 days I had lost around 300 photos from the SD card. I had around 600 photos on Thursday, more than half are gone (randomly, couldn't see a pattern for leftover photos). On Friday I upgraded the phone to .6 from .3, it wiped out the phone but was not supposed to delete anything from SD card. My music and video files seem to be not affected, ebooks are also untouched. SD card itself seems to be working fine, no corrupted files, no unusual files/folders on it. I don't think it was the upgrade but have no idea what could have happened. Before the upgrade I had to install HTC sync, to get the driver. Does it do something by default? Does it sync/remove any files?
We just came back from vacation. Most of the pictures were taken on my camera, but I had good amount of shots on the phone. It's my fault for not coping everything before the update but I wanted to know if you had seen anything like that.
My only hope is to check the work computer that I used for upgrade, but I don't think sync would move files without any notice.
This may not be what happened to you but i did have a friend that did the upgrade OTA, there wasnt enough space on his SD card for the OTA file, plus i guess it also needs extra space to swap files. Therefore, in his situation files on the sd were randomly overwritten. Anyway this im getting 3rd party from him so it might not apply to you but thought id toss it out there.
Evo Sent
Did the pics get moved to LOST.DIR? Sometimes when you plug your phone into a computer and don't eject or unmount the card, some files get corrupted and moved there. It sucks cuz it removes the extension, and changes the file name to a number, but sometimes you can just add the jpg extensions and save the pics. It's worth a try.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App
Yep. Same thing happened to me. I wasn't doing any kind of upgrade or anything. Still had 4+ Gigs free on my SDcard. Opened up the gallery and it only had 10 pictures in it. 90something pics just gone. I checked LOST.DIR and there is one big file in there around 140MB. Can't find a way to extract it.
Luckily, I had a backup on my laptop that was only a couple of days old so I got most of my pics back, but still annoying.
LOST.DIR has one small file.
I didn't think about not enough space on SD. I had around 300Mb when started the update, I didn't have to copy anything to the card, it was ran from the computer.
My lesson (again and again): there is not enough backup.
Thanks for replies!

Google Photos Issue?

Got my 6P yesterday and getting it set up. I Have an issue I just can't seem to get around easily. I have all my pics from my last phone stored on my computer. If I copy those pics to the internal storage of my new phone google photos will create duplicates correct? If so how can I avoid this? I'm sure I am overlooking something. Thanks
I think it intelligently skips dupes based on file name and timestamp info. I had Google Photos on my Nexus 6 and loaded it onto my 6p to get access to all the old ones. I then remembered that I had a ton of photos in Dropbox and Copy with their respective photo backup options from multiple years on old phones (before Google Photos existed). I went on my PC and downloaded ALL of them (like 3,000 photos) then uploaded via Google Photos web. Some of those were already in there for sure, and it does not appear there are duplicates. I would try it with a small test that you know for sure is in there and see if it dupes, and if it doesn't, just upload from PC. No need to move to your phone first.
I used Chrome and I just dragged and dropped the photos onto the Google Photos tab and it uploaded. I let it run overnight and it did almost 2,000 photos in one shot, just took a while.
fury683 said:
I think it intelligently skips dupes based on file name and timestamp info. I had Google Photos on my Nexus 6 and loaded it onto my 6p to get access to all the old ones. I then remembered that I had a ton of photos in Dropbox and Copy with their respective photo backup options from multiple years on old phones (before Google Photos existed). I went on my PC and downloaded ALL of them (like 3,000 photos) then uploaded via Google Photos web. Some of those were already in there for sure, and it does not appear there are duplicates. I would try it with a small test that you know for sure is in there and see if it dupes, and if it doesn't, just upload from PC. No need to move to your phone first.
I used Chrome and I just dragged and dropped the photos onto the Google Photos tab and it uploaded. I let it run overnight and it did almost 2,000 photos in one shot, just took a while.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, that kinda worked. I disabled backup before copying the pics to my phone just in case it started backing things up. It did appear there were many duplicates but it was easy to see what was a duplicate bu the not backed up icon in the pics. Once I removed them I turned back up back on. Minor inconvenience.

Photos just disappeared

I'm hoping someone can help me.
For no explainable reason on my part, all my photos have disappeared. I can not see any photos in gallery or Google photos. I can however located photos that I took with my camera in DCIM Folder, however these don't show up in either photo app. I have tried restating and clearing gallery cache etc I have even tried restoring using smart switch to an earlier backup however the problem still exists.
Any clues what's going on?
Update: for some odd reason my phone was filled with ".nomedia" files. I deleted them all, restarted my phone and ran an app called "Media Re.Scan" and they magically reappeared. However only camera photos have reappeared. Other media has not, but I'm not sure they were visible to begin with. I would really appreciate if someone has a theory for this.
Update 2: Don't delete all .nomedia files as this will cause all jpeg files to show up in your gallery including system files and apps etc that have images. Instead only delete .nomedia files found in your photos folder and folders you want to appear in gallery etc. Make sure show hidden files is selected to find these files in the first place. I used ES file Explorer Pro.
Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
Thanks. problem solved!
seeing the same problem in s8
i just got samsung s8 recently. i am new to the samsung phone but i am seeing the exact same problem. i see pictures i took from earlier today and a few fays ago just magically disapper. I have tried multiple things like deleting the cache, data, using quick pro, cut and paste the dscim in a new folder, deleting the .nomedia but i CANNOT make those missing pictures reappear anywhere. Anyone else who ran into this and maybe have fixed the problem?
I'm having the same problem on my S8...taking new pics & downloading pics/gifs then they disappear out of nowhere the next day or so. Just started happening after the last software update (4/3/18). Not sure why or how to recover them. I've had my phone since April 2017 & it's never done this before.
Photos corrupted
Hi guys,
sorry for resuming this post.
Happened this summer and never before on my SM-G935F ITV smartphone, never rooted and stock rom (Android 8).
I loose all the latest photos, or better they are on the card but the thumbnails are grey, I tried to open them with an hex editor and I discovered they are all filled by 0x0.
I used to save them directly on a SD from Huawei 256Gb, scanned and works perfectly.
The only dubt I have is the number of photos saved into the dcim folder, they are over 2048...magic number!
Once I moved the photos in another folder I can take the photos again as usual...
It's just to know if I discovered a bug or what...
Any one with this issue?
Thanks, Pier

Google Photos not deleting files from device.

I'm noticing that I'm building up Image data even though I'm deleting every picture I take off of the device once it's uploaded to the cloud. However when I check the SD card storage the pictures are still there. Thumbnails as well. Hire can I fix this?
Bueller.... Bueller?
So far I've tried deleting data from Photos camera, and media storage to no avail.
I'm thinking it might have to do with the trash holding photos for 60 days before permanently deleting.
I'm thinking it might have to do with the trash holding photos for 60 days before permanently deleting.
AndrasLOHF said:
I'm noticing that I'm building up Image data even though I'm deleting every picture I take off of the device once it's uploaded to the cloud. However when I check the SD card storage the pictures are still there. Thumbnails as well. Hire can I fix this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not sure if you've done this, but with newest version of photos, you can go into Settings and select Free Up Space and then it'll look for already uploaded photo to the cloud and remove it from your device. I do this about every 2 weeks to free up the device. I recommend cross reference the photos between app and photos.google.com to make sure. Also have NAS locally to back it up too.

Google Photos doesn't "map" my pictures despite being on my phone

I have this issue where my pictures (camera pics and otherwise) doesn't show up in the photos app.
Using a file explorer app, I see that all my images are there in the DCIM folder, so they are definitely still on the phone.
Using the likes of WhatsApp and similar, I used to be able to select and send pictures, and it would categorize them into the folders I've downloaded them into.
For instance, while camera pictures are in /DCIM/Camera - images downloaded from apps and websites are in either /Download or /Pictures/{app_name}
Additionally, the file explorer tends to categorize your files into subcategories like "pictures", "apps" etc., but it doesn't do that for older files - only for new ones. So if I take a picture with the camera, it'll pop into Google Photos as well as being categorized a "picture" by the file explorer. Physically, it still has the same location as all the other camera pictures, which is /DCIM/Camera
My question is, how do I get the phone/Google Photos/file categorizer/whatever to "map" my pictures as being pictures again?
Setup info:
Huawei Nexus 6P, 64 GB, no external SD card
Rooted, PureNexus (latest July release)
ElementalX kernel (latest release)
-----------------------
UPDATE: So it appears, if there's a ".nomedia" file in any directory, it will not show files in this and recursively in media applications (photos, music, etc.) -- this could be what's causing this. But then I don't understand why NEW files shows up.
Is it recommended to delete the .nomedia file in root/sdcard ? I ask because I figure it's there for a reason.
having a .NOMEDIA file on a folder will cause it to be excluded
thats a feature
Also, if the folder name has a . in it at the beggining it will also do that... for example changing Camera to .Camera will exclude it
chaco81 said:
having a .NOMEDIA file on a folder will cause it to be excluded
thats a feature
Also, if the folder name has a . in it at the beggining it will also do that... for example changing Camera to .Camera will exclude it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah thanks, but removing the file does nothing. Old pictures are still nowhere to be found in gallery apps like Google Photos.
Is there a way to "re-map/re-index" media files?
i just want to state the obvious.... but did you open PHOTOS, then click the top left hambuger button and click DEVICE FOLDERS ??? According to you nothing still shows after this??
If you install an aftermarket app like Quickpic, does it still not show them?
Stopped using google photos for same reason. I flash roms like atleast once a month, all the photos that i took after flashing rom will show up, all the ones that were taken before flash wont. It has nothing to do with .nomedia or stuff like that, it just wont show them. If i go through directories i can reach them, i can also see them using any other gallery app, this only happens in google photos. I had a theory it had something to do with cloud backup, as if photos arent backed up in cloud it wont show them.
chaco81 said:
i just want to state the obvious.... but did you open PHOTOS, then click the top left hambuger button and click DEVICE FOLDERS ??? According to you nothing still shows after this??
If you install an aftermarket app like Quickpic, does it still not show them?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks chaco81, I have tried device folders - and nothing is in there.
Next up, installed Quickpic and now they are all there. They are all categorized exactly as they should be. Fantastic! Just really weird it doesn't work with Google Photos, which leads me to this comment by @feis ....
feis said:
Stopped using google photos for same reason. I flash roms like atleast once a month, all the photos that i took after flashing rom will show up, all the ones that were taken before flash wont. It has nothing to do with .nomedia or stuff like that, it just wont show them. If i go through directories i can reach them, i can also see them using any other gallery app, this only happens in google photos. I had a theory it had something to do with cloud backup, as if photos arent backed up in cloud it wont show them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Dude, thank you! That must be it, then. How weird is that? The cloud thing I theorized as well, as I don't want Google backing them up and therefore have it disabled. But like I said, I just installed Quickpic and now they're all there, neatly categorized into "screenshots", "camera", "Download" etc.
Next issue: This still persist with WhatsApp. When I go into "Gallery" (to send a picture or video), it'll only the new photos and videos -- none of the old ones. This, again, leads me to believe something is not as it should be. What causes this, and how do you fix it? Do you need to somehow "rescan" and "reindex" your media files?
Uninstalled google photos, started using app called "piktures" and all my problems were gone.
If you are going to use quickpic I would side load the last version before cheetah took over and ruined the app with all the cloud ***t Trying to think of what the last version was, maybe 4.5.2
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk
Sheetzie03 said:
If you are going to use quickpic I would side load the last version before cheetah took over and ruined the app with all the cloud ***t Trying to think of what the last version was, maybe 4.5.2
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I read about that. I just installed Quickpic, and I don't get what the big issue is. The only cloud-thing I saw was an icon that I could easily disable/remove.
@feis
How exactly did you remove Google Photos? I can't uninstall.
I too have this issue. Annoying and I really should just use a different pic app
Just a quick update on this: The issue has been _sort of_ fixed by just switching to another photos app. So I think the problem is just that Google Photos doesn't reindex, and there doesn't seem to be a way to force it.
However, other apps that has access to media such as WhatsApp -- in this I still don't have the option of viewing older photos. So apps like WhatsApp's gallery feature, doesn't reindex either. Pretty annoying actually.

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