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Grey screen with exclamation point in place of my pictures

CamoGoddess

Lurker
About a week ago, I went on a road trip, and when I got home I went to upload and share some of the pictures from said road trip. When I did, my pictures had been replaced with a grey screen with an exclamation point in the middle. I have restarted the phone several times, and occasionally a few of the pictures will appear in the thumbnails but when you click on them, it's back to the grey screen. Today, I went to access a picture and the ENTIRE camera gallery was MISSING. I restarted the phone and now it's back, but wth is up with my phone, and please please how do I fix it?!
 
About a week ago, I went on a road trip, and when I got home I went to upload and share some of the pictures from said road trip. When I did, my pictures had been replaced with a grey screen with an exclamation point in the middle. I have restarted the phone several times, and occasionally a few of the pictures will appear in the thumbnails but when you click on them, it's back to the grey screen. Today, I went to access a picture and the ENTIRE camera gallery was MISSING. I restarted the phone and now it's back, but wth is up with my phone, and please please how do I fix it?!

You didn't think you accidentally had the lens covered by something when you were taking said road trips pictures?

Or can you see the any part of them you've taken? If so you can you can just open each photo and screen shot the photos.
 
Aside from the current issue, may I highly recommend that you have your device to auto sync your photos to the cloud (it will use more data outside of wifi, so be aware of that). You can also set it to sync via wifi also, but that won't be instant when you take the pic ;)

Oh, and also, WELCOME TO AF!! :D :D

Carry on! :D
 
The gray screen with the ! Indicates one of several things. The format is unreadable by your existing software, the images are corrupted or there is an OS issue on your phone. The odds are that this can be fixed.

The first thing you need to do is clear your system cache. If you are not sure on how to do that Google it or post here and I will lay out the steps.
The next thing is to goto Settings/Apps and scroll down to Gallery and tap on it. In the window that opens up, tap on storage and then CLEAR DATA and CLEAR CACHE.
Now check Gallery for your pictures.
If they still show up as gray boxes, go to Google play store and download one of the higher-rated picture apps. Try this app to see if it can open your pictures.

Best of luck, and please post if you need additional help or explanations


I cleared gallery cache, went into recovery mode, pressed on "wipe system cache," and rebooted, and my images are all GONE. I can't even find the exclamation marks with grey background. Before I did what you told me to do, I could at least find traces of my image, and my storage was occupied by the corrupted images, but now they're straight up GONE. I can't even find any traces. Were you trying to prank people? If you were, you are a horrible person. If you weren't, why has this happened, and what can I do to restore my data?
 
I cleared gallery cache, went into recovery mode, pressed on "wipe system cache," and rebooted, and my images are all GONE. I can't even find the exclamation marks with grey background. Before I did what you told me to do, I could at least find traces of my image, and my storage was occupied by the corrupted images, but now they're straight up GONE. I can't even find any traces. Were you trying to prank people? If you were, you are a horrible person. If you weren't, why has this happened, and what can I do to restore my data?

As I've explained in your other thread, wiping system cache is pretty standard advice and will fix numerous Android issues. No one is trying to prank anyone. :)
 
My mom and I thought we deactivated Google photos or whatever but apparently it was still working and all her photos were backed up there thanks anyways guys!
 
I cleared gallery cache, went into recovery mode, pressed on "wipe system cache," and rebooted, and my images are all GONE. I can't even find the exclamation marks with grey background. Before I did what you told me to do, I could at least find traces of my image, and my storage was occupied by the corrupted images, but now they're straight up GONE. I can't even find any traces. Were you trying to prank people? If you were, you are a horrible person. If you weren't, why has this happened, and what can I do to restore my data?
 
I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 with the same problem. Some pictures turn out perfect and others simply show a grey screen with a red exclamation. Sometimes it shows the original picture in the thumbnail until you go into the gallery and then just the exclamation. Usually whole strings of photos are ruined after an important event. This is "rage-worthy" I brought my phone to the T-Mobile store.and was shown how to clear the cache but in short time it does the same thing again. It worked perfect when I first bought the phone without any cache clearing and now a year later it must be cleared daily to work. This is not right. Something is wrong and it's not okay. Any advice beyond what has already been offered will be appreciated.

Thank You!
 
I've noticed that with corrupted sdcards, usually..
  • Do your pictures get saved straight to the card or just internal storage.. i.e. -> How is your camera data managed?
If this is an internal storage issue, this may possibly be results of a corrupted OTA installation.. you could possibly reinstall the actual Factory Firmware (FW) from sammobile.com with ODIN.exe
Whatever you do, make sure it is the correct firmware (or newer) for your specific device model and current security patch level (info found in Settings-AboutPhone) or you could actually render said expensive device useless due to certain partition software conflicts.
 
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