Help "Media Not Found" - Photos 'Disappearing' on S5 SD

[Jonasori]

Hey all-

I'm new here, both to this forum and to the world of Android. I just recently came over from an iPhone 4s to my shiny new Galaxy S5, which I've been loving so far. However, of course, I would not be writing this if there wasn't a problem with it.

To add some storage space to the phone, I bought a fairly cheap 32gb micro SD card, primarily to hold my music and photos, since those are my two primary space-eaters. While my music has given me no problems at all, my photos have been acting up quite a lot.

Symptoms: Sometimes when I take a photo and go to review it, I will either get "Media Not Found," two vertical bars of color (usually black and white), or the "Image Missing" icon (a gray image icon with an exclamation point on a black background). This only comes up with photos that are saved to the SD card (which is where photos taken with the stock camera app go, whereas shots taken with Google Camera and others stay internal), and has just started happening within the last few days (the phone is about three weeks old, while the issue is only about one week old).

Ideas: I've guessed that this could be a problem with the SD card, but if that were the case then shouldn't the files a) be completely disappearing (rather than leaving placeholders) and b) shouldn't music and other files on the card be getting lost as well? I've also wondered if it is a problem with the Camera app, which is unfortunately untested since I can't figure out how to make Google Camera save to the SD (like I said, I'm still quite new to Android). It doesn't seem to be anything involving the Gallery apps, since both Google Photos and Gallery both lose the same images.

Any other ideas? I've tried to do some research on this, but I haven't been able to find anything. That said, if I've missed something, please feel free to just link me there.


Thank you for any and all help. This is really getting annoying so I'd love to find a way to fix it.

Thanks!

~Jonas

 

[Fox Mulder]

Where did you get that "fairly cheap" SD card? If it came from Ebay or some other open-market source there's a good chance it's counterfeit as this is very common. Such cards will not actually have the advertised capacity and may otherwise be of inferior quality.
Try the card in a PC, move some large files to it to verify its true size. See if files transferred from the PC have the same problems as with the phone.
If the card proves to be sketchy, pull whatever valuable files from it that you can salvage and then throw it in the garbage. Next proceed to your nearest major legitimate retailer (Best Buy, Micro Center, or whatever is near you) to purchase a genuine brand-name replacement.
This is a well-known instance of where trying to save a few bucks can hurt you.

 

[Jonasori]

Thanks for the quick reply. Yup, looking back I'm realizing that it was an unbranded, generic eBay buy. That said, for the sake of understanding, is there anything I can do to save this one? And why are the JPEGs crashing but the MP3s staying?

 

[Fox Mulder]

I can't explain your specific issue but given that it's almost certainly a counterfeit card I wouldn't advise wasting any more time trying to get it working. Buy legit card, learn lesson, move on.

 

[Pugs1957]

Samsungs are from experience notorious for screwing up sd cards regardless of brand. My Samsung class 10 became corrupt today. I was able to recover the card but data is gone. After the first failure, I now always back up my sd card.
Pleas dont get caught out without a backup.