Help Note 9 screenshots transfer

[GregFC]

Hello, I've been searching for help on this for a month or so now here and various other places and can't find my specific issue anywhere, hoping someone can help or at least have some ideas to point me in the right direction.

I can backup my Samsung Galaxy Note 9's photos and videos (from Phone/DCIM/Camera) to my own PC easily after connecting them via the USB cable and hitting allow and all that on my phone, but my phone is still filling up because for the life of me I can't backup my screenshots.

Most were taken with the s-pen's screen write function, but some were taken with the palm swipe method or the volume down + power button method... doesn't matter, all of them are seemingly invisible to my Windows 7 PC when trying to find them in explorer. They're not in the obvious place (Phone/DCIM/Screenshots), which just acts like it's loading a ton of files for several minutes and then ends up showing 0 items... and I can't find them anywhere else, either. I'm not using any SD cards, nor am I uploading anything to a cloud service or anything like that, just want to oldschool transfer all my data to my computer via USB cable and start fresh with tons of room available. Oh, and if I go to a screenshot in my phone's Gallery app and view details, it says it's located in Internal Storage/DCIM/Screenshots with name format "Screenshot_2019MMDD-HHMMSS_ProgramName.jpg". And yet... invisible!

Before getting this phone in 2018, I had a Note 4 for several years. While the photos and videos were in the same exact directory, the screenshots were in a whole other spot in the file structure. But I've looked everywhere, I've even just copied entire folders to my PC in the hopes that the screenshots would somehow get transferred, but... to no avail. Any help/ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

[Hadron]

If you can see them from the phone but not the PC why not try "pushing" them from the phone rather than "pulling" them from the PC? There are file explorer apps that can access network storage, you can email the screenshots to yourself, upload them to a cloud store than download to the PC, share them via bluetooth.

I'm afraid I don't use Windows with Android, so don't really know the quirks and limitations of that combination.

 

[GregFC]

I've thought about trying to download a file management app from the android store to see if it could facilitate the transfer of those screenshots, but the ones I was seeing recommended were not free apps and as I've never spent a penny on a mobile phone app I wasn't eager to spend $5 or $20 or whatever it was going to take and potentially not solve the problem. But I'll keep looking and see if there's any reputable free ones to try.

The videos are all .mp4s and the photos are .jpgs, same as the screenshots (also .jpgs, I mean), so it's just weird that my PC and my phone agree about the location/existence of all those videos and photos but... not about the screenshots. Was hoping someone else had had the same problem.

As for e-mailing... the volume/size of the screenshots would make that a bit of a painful method, and I'd prefer to avoid using a cloud solution if at all possible, just want to get them straight from my phone to PC without having to do the additional steps of cloud uploading/downloading and all and relying on an internet or mobile data connection. But if I have to, I suppose I can try that, too. I'll pursue the potential file explorer app angle first, though, and wait and see if anyone else has had the same issue between Android/Windows PC. Thanks for the ideas.

 

[Hadron]

Ah, videos - I did wonder why "screenshots" could be such an issue

No problem transferring from my Pixel to my Mac via USB, though the Pixel stores the screenshots in a different place (Pictures/Screenshots in the internal storage, rather than in DCIM). The irony is that Android uses a Microsoft protocol (MTP) for this, so you'd expect Windows to be unproblematic.

One other thought: have you considered moving the files to a different folder on your phone and then seeing whether you can copy them from there (selecting the files to move, not just the entire content of the folder in case there's something funny in there that's causing the issue)? Just in case for some reason there's something funny about or in the folder.