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Help Pictures Completely Gone!?

B

Bridgetgall

Lurker
I was looking at my storage on my LG Optimus G and i realized that none of my SD card was being used. I thought maybe I'd push my photos over to my SD card to make some room on my internal storage. I googled around to find out how to do this, and a lot of people said to download "Send to SD Card". I did this, and tried to transfer them all over, but still no space was used in my SD card. So then, people were saying to use ASTRO File Manager and just copy and paste my images into the SD card folder in there. I did that, but then when I came back out into my gallery, the majority of my images were all broken. When I clicked on the thumbnails, it just showed me a grey and white box that was cracked in half.
Ok, so I searched what could be the fix to this, and people said "I just took out my sd card and put it back in and everything was fine". Well, I'm an idiot and I did that. But I didn't unmount it first. So I come back in an almost all my images are completely missing from my gallery. I've used file managers to try and find them, nothing.
The weird thing is, there is still 1.42 GB of pictures taken up on my internal storage. So it's like my pictures are all there, but I can't find them anywhere!!

Any help??
Thannks!
 
Hello and welcome, Bridgetgall. Sorry about your pictures debacle.

The fact that the space is reported as being used tells us that the data is there (the pics) but likely corrupted or with the wrong file extension.

I'd use an adapter to view the contents of the Gallery and the DCIM folder (camera pics or downloaded pics?), right click one and check out the file extension (the letters to the right of the dot in the file name).

If the pics are viewable on the pc but not in the phone, then you can copy them to a folder on your pc then right back to the phone's external sd card (after a format).
 
If your sdcard is big enough, the easiest solution might be to use Astro to copy everything from the phone to the sdcard. Then take the sdcard and put it in a computer, and use the computer to figure all out all the files.

EDIT:
Or copy all files directly from in the phone to a computer. Whichever is easier.
 
If you can plug sd card into a pc that would be best.

Alternatively you can download an app like sd card rescan, which will scan sd card and update gallery.

Make sure you reboot phone afterwards as well
 
I can't find the image files anywhere. I have a mac, so I have Android File Transfer on my laptop and when I go into the Android files, my images aren't anywhere in there. I have a feeling my images could be on my SD card, so I took it out and I'm going to try and find a card reader and see if that works...
 
It's strange, though, because there is still 1.5 GB of photos on my phone, even with the SD card taken out. That confuses me. The files are honestly no where to be found.
I've tried SD Card Rescan, it didn't do anything.
 
First once you get your SDCARD and can view it if no pictures then try Photorec this is a powerful command line utility that can recover from the SDCARD There is a Mac version so you should be good to go as far as that goes. I don't believe it will work on the phone though so sorry about that. As far as the phone itself goes not sure about anything that will retrieve the documents if they are not showing up you could try a dd raw command but I'm not sure of the command you would need for that.
 
Bridgetgall said:
It's strange, though, because there is still 1.5 GB of photos on my phone, even with the SD card taken out. That confuses me. The files are honestly no where to be found.
I've tried SD Card Rescan, it didn't do anything.
Click to expand...

;) It would be prudent to have a look at the contents of your internal memory via file manager and your external, removable sd card via that file manager and proper adapter for you computer.

Have a look at the file extensions. Try to view pics on your computer. Move them around, copy them, etc. This will indicate that there is no corruption.

But If you cannot see the files or they are there but can't render as pics, then you've got a corrupted storage area on the sd card or perhaps full mass storage area internally.
 
Bridgetgall said:
It's strange, though, because there is still 1.5 GB of photos on my phone, even with the SD card taken out. That confuses me. The files are honestly no where to be found.
Click to expand...
They might be in a folder called lost+found
That is a common linux folder where corrupted files go.
 
Bridgetgall said:
It's strange, though, because there is still 1.5 GB of photos on my phone, even with the SD card taken out. That confuses me. The files are honestly no where to be found.
I've tried SD Card Rescan, it didn't do anything.
Click to expand...

I would think it's in your internal storage and not the external SD card in this case. The folder /sdcard is your internal memory.
The folder /sdcard/external_sd is your microSD card. Sorry if you already knew this, it just seems very strange to me.
 
I'm late to this discussion I realize ... I have one question that never seemed to have been answered. While all of this is happening did you boot (power off/power on) at any time? If not, I recommend that you do.

... Thom
 
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