Help How does gallery app work with the SD card?

[sdowney717]

I dumped 1567 photos in DCIM/Camera and maybe only 291 show up, with 1000 photos in autobackup?

I pulled the SD card and booted phone, camera folder is gone, but autobackup of 1000 photos remains.

How do I make gallery app work again?

 

[Slug]

Go to Settings/Apps, find Gallery, select Storage then Clear cache.

Power the phone off, reinsert the microSD card, and restart. The Gallery should regenerate its thumbnail images and all your photos should show up.

Note: the scanning and regeneration process will take some time with 1500+ images.

 

[sdowney717]

ok, thanks.
I gave up on having 1567 photos in one spot.
Using the PC with card reader I modified the sdcard layout
I created folders by year, 2012 through 2017 and put pictures taken organized by year into corresponding folders.

There was a folder called my_flix. I put video files by year there and also left video files in the year photos folders, so they are duplicates.

When I rebooted the gallery app scanned and found all the photos and the videos.

But I did not like the way gallery ignored showing the my_flix folder, it just shows the tile called 2012 with 100 photos and another tile called 2012 with 5 videos.

So I thought rename the sub folder 2012 in the my_flix folder to v2012 to at least distinguish that, rebooted and said preparing sdcard, BUT gallery shows no change just showing two 2012 folders, one with photos and videos, one with videos. Huh?

So first how can I force gallery to like completely start over. I tried clear data but it does not show the renamed tiles from 2012 to v2012.
clear data had 99mb in it, clear cache had 0

And WHY does Gallery not show a folder called my_flix with then each subfolder that you would click on see each year of videos in subfolders, 2012 through 2016?

Gallery does show a folder called my_pix with about 30 photos.

This makes no sense at all.
I am also paranoid Google Photos what will it do to my video and photos when I reinstall it. I have an entire set of photos and videos up on their web site.
What would it do to the duplicated videos, what will it do with the same photos organized into differnet folders from when it was running on the phone.

 

[sdowney717]

I just tried it again, delete gallery data, reboot phone, gallery just comes up, scans, but no changes, so clearing data does nothing.
Do I have to nuke the sdcard and start over again?

OR, maybe this. I pull out sdcard, run gallery, it rescans and finds nothing.
Clear data again.
Then shut down phone put in sdcard, it rescans and finds stuff.

??

 

[sdowney717]

Got it working, the key was to shutdown, pull the sdcard out, reboot, do gallery app clear data, reboot, let it scan nothing. turn off put in sdcard, reboot. It scanned again and looks better layout wise to me.

Now it shows tiles with videos as v2012 etc... Still ignores listing a my_flix tile. Gallery does show a my_pix tile. Gallery imo is stupider than I am.

Now what will happen with reinstalling Google Photos app?
How about the duplicate videos, see I want to let Google photos keep backing them up on Google, I thought if they are not present in the photos folders, Google Photos on the web might delete them on the web. The idea of putting the videos in their own folder was easy to view them.

 

[sdowney717]

Google photos is an embarrassing wreck on this phone now.
Before I reinstalled google photos app, the pictures matched.
Then I reinstalled the app, sync settings were turned off.
Pictures between phone and web matched.
Nothing was syncing, so went to photos settings syncing and enabled it

So it started doing some syncing, eventually all the little circling icons went away.
BUT, lots of photos on phone are GONE. But they are still up on the web.

The photos are still on the phone in the spots I created, Gallery still shows them as does file manager.

How do I repair google photos so this thing works as it used to work?

 

[sdowney717]

I noticed I was getting an error on google account.

On the phone under accounts and sync for Google account, I get red exclamation mark says is currently experiencing problems it will be back shortly.
Been saying that since last night.

So I deleted the google account from the phone.
I setup the google account on the phone.
Now I see the missing photos are showing up on the phone.

BUT!, the very first photos from July 4, are showing up as January photos, but it is not done syncing yet.
It is dumb to see fireworks photos from Jul 4 2016 as the first photos in the app listed as from 'yesterday'.

 

[sdowney717]

I found out those misplaced photos have no metadata, so no date as to when taken.
However they are in the correct placement on google photos on the web, and out of place on the phone.