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Help Big Goof- Factory Reset

JRNDB

Lurker
I'm not technologically savvy, so I'm going to ask for help the best way I can and try to explain my situation.

I have a Samsung Note 4. I also have a stupid selfie stick. My husband and I were on a cruise this past week and decided to use the selfie stick for pictures. My phone was in airplane mode the entire trip. Thursday, we got off the boat (phone still in airplane mode) and I put my phone in the selfie stick. I didn't realize that the "down" volume button was being held down. I saw a screen pop up that was black with yellow, green, and red writing. I couldn't even read it because it flashed off and the phone restarted. I THINK it said something about a factory reset. I freaked out and the first thing I did was pull up my pictures to be sure they were all still on the phone... they were. Every thing was fine. So I continued to take pictures like normal. Every picture I took showed up in the little preview pane on the lower left side and I could click on that to bring the photo up.
Fast forward to that evening. We wanted to look through the pictures from the day, so I pulled my gallery up. The pictures were not there (in the album Camera). I started freaking out. I took another picture and it showed up in the little left lower preview pane. I clicked on that picture to bring it up to the full screen and then swiped to the left and there was one of the pictures from earlier that day. I kept swiping and all of the pictures were there. I exited out of that screen and went back to the Gallery and they were NO WHERE. But every time I took another picture, I could swipe to the left and see the "missing" pictures. So just for the heck of it, I decided to take screenshots of the pictures, JUST IN CASE. So I scrolled through and screenshotted every picture. I figured two copies beat no copies.
Today, we got off the boat, heading home and I turned off airplane mode and other than 50 million facebook notifications and 60 million text messages, nothing was any different with the phone.
I tried to do my trick with taking a picture to view the "missing" pictures and no-go. They weren't there anymore. I've looked EVERYWHERE. I've downloaded Recuva and Mobikin and can't find anything (but I have no clue what I'm doing with those), I've hooked the phone up to a USB cord to my laptop, I've chatted with Verizon (ugh) and just cannot figure this out.
Normally, I'd just say, well, they're gone...But they were THERE! I viewed them three different times. So I KNOW they were somewhere on this stinking phone.

I ran out of cloud space back in may and hadn't upgraded or deleted anything, so no, they aren't on my cloud. And no, I didn't use dropbox or google+ (although, the first thing I did was sign up for google + so NOW they'll back up from here forward...I know, I know....I should have been doing that all along, but you don't know you need that until you NEED that.

Anyway, anybody got any other suggestions? Like I said, I'm not tech savvy, but I can follow directions VERY well! And I'm willing to try ANYTHING! Thanks!
 
Open up a File Manager app.

Goto Device Storage/Pictures
that folder is a place holder for anything and everything on the phone's internal storage that keeps pictures, Facebook, Twitter, SMS apps/Cameras etc....

you should see them there and be able to copy them off....

I really like an app called ASUS File Manager, it will find pictures anywhere on the phone, and you can copy them via WiFi to a PC Shared Folder

* File Manager ASUS - Android Apps on Google Play

the same folder layout is on the extSDcard.....
you need to make a point of going into every camera app you have, and make the DEFAULT storage location
extSDcard/DCIM

that way, if the phone is broken, the pictures will be saved on the SD card....
having it back up to the cloud is good, if you do it via WiFi only.... the data required will bankrupt you on Data Plans.
 
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and, IF you ever need to buy a different phone, do NOT get one UNLESS it has a slot for an extSDcard....
that is your insurance policy...
 
So this is just a suggestion as it sounds like there's just something going on with the Gallery app on your phone. It could be something as minor as just the viewing mode needs to be changed but maybe a better alternative is to stop using Gallery and instead install the Google Photos app, it's free and available from Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.photos&hl=en
Like the Gallery app, Google Photos is a photo library manager but more importantly it has more functionality, including a very important automatic back up and sync option. It will back up the photos on your phone to your online Google account.

So install the app and see if Google Photos is able to detect, and show, all your photos. If yes, take the time to go through its menu settings to tailor things to your liking. In the 'hamburger menu' (three parallel lines) in the upper left corner open up 'Settings'. Be sure to check the 'Back up & sync' option is enabled. Note that the first initial backup might take up a few hours, depending on how many photos you have accumulated on your phone and how fast your home broadband connection is. Once it's done, your entire photo library can be viewed either on your phone using the Google Photos app or using a web browser on any computer by going to:
https://photos.google.com

As you referred to Google+, note that Google has been taking different services it had been integrating into G+ and letting them return to being on their own again. So while you can still post images to your G+ account it's no longer the default storage for photos. Also, those screen captures you did to 'duplicate' some of your photos will probably be a lower resolution than the originals. Screen captures are based partly on how their taken and on the resolution of the display itself.
 
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