Help Battery Draining: Gallery >>> Awake Time

[NewPepper]

I noticed this morning that battery power had dropped more quickly today then the last three days so I went into settings/battery to look at what has been running. I noticed that Gallery was the second actvity listed (below cell standby) and when I clicked the battery drain chart, it showed the phone had been AWAKE for like 5 hours. Now, I haven't used the phone much in 3 days because i've been too busy at work (yes, the charge has lasted 3 days) so I knew it was odd that Gallery was at the top of the list between yesterday and today. What's more, I never ran the app or took a picture or anything to do with Gallery in the last 3 days, so it just showed up out of nowhere. I deduced that Gallery was obvioously running and keeping the phone awake so I Force Closed it. Lo and Behold, when I checked the phone battery in an hour, no more AWAKE and Gallery % had declined. Long story to get to my question:

What might have started the Gallery app running and why might it have been keeping the phone in AWAKE state?

I've been so busy that I've not used the phone much for the last 3 days. A few phone calls, some texting, email reading, updated a few apps in the play store. Put the phone on Airplane Mode at night, wifi at home during evening hours and 4G at the office (great reception in Charlotte NC). I thought 3 days of battery was pretty impressive.

See Post below titled SOLVED for solution

 

[NewPepper]

Happened agin this morning. Gallery started running and keeps the phone in Awake state. I noticed it listed on the Battery status page. It had over 2 hours of Stay Awake time. I force-stopped it.

 

[line6ix]

This happened to me today too. Yesterday i went all day with my normal usage and it was still at 80% charge. Today it was dropping like a rock. By noon it was at 27% charge. Checked my settings and Gallery was 43% of the usage, just below Android System (48%). Just force closed, so hopefully it doesn't come back.

[As a side note. I don't like Samsung's gallery at all. Especially not compared to HTC's on my Incredible.]

 

[Mar]

some other person reported something similar. Apparently there might be a corrupt image or video in your gallery and it keeps the gallery awake. Try removing photos/ videos until you find the one that is corrupted and then that should fix it. You can add the non corrupt ones back in later

 

[NewPepper]

My Gallery is empty. Nothing in it. No video, no pictures. nada. zip. zilch. very strange...

 

[NewPepper]

SOLVED

Again today Gallery was keeping the phone awake and draining battery. It was in the list of things consuming battery on the settings/battery screen. So i went into settings/applications/running and it showed the gallery app was running. So i clicked on it and in the processes detail it showed that Picasa was trying to Sync for over 4 hours. So I went into settings/accounts and sync. Picasa is part of Google so I opened my Google account and sure enough the Sync Picasa Web Albums was checked and it was trying to sync. I guessing since I don't use Picasa it gets stuck in some kind of sync jail because it can't find an account. So I unchecked it and it stopped.

I wonder if this is the cause for some of the fast battery drain reports and complaints we are reading elsewhere on this board?

 

[jdk2]

Thanks NewPepper for the tip. I had the same thing happen today.

 

[aiguofer]

I just registered to this forum so I could say thanks. I don't think I would have ever found this on my own haha.

 

[NSX00]

Newpepper - I also registered just to thank you for this. Fortunately I found this relatively quickly and didn't have to waste hours searching for the solution. I very much appreciate you posting the solution to this problem that I'm sure many other people have, are, or will experience.

 

[jeromewilson]

Registered to say thanks, so... thanks! The battery drain was doing my head in.

 

[QueenGalaxy]

So how many applications should be left running when you click on that applications page?

 

[jasonbosch]

I had the same issue, except before the latest Android update on Verizon, it just said "Media" was using all of my battery. Much more than the screen even! All the time. After the update, the Media changed to Gallery, which gave me the clue that the Gallery was causing the issue. I had already tried disabling the Picasa sync, and that didn't fix the issue. I had also tried disabling about 50 other things and could never find the problem. I just couldn't get the draining to go away.

As a last ditch effort, I tried Disabling the entire Gallery App. Not just stopping it, clicking "Disable" in the Gallery app settings. Sol ed the problem instantly. If you don't already, you should totally be using the QuikPic app as your photo gallery since it's waaay faster and better than Samsung's gallery. The only problem is that the default camera app only uses the stock gallery app, so you can't quickly view your photos after you take them. But I found a better camera app in ProCapture anyhow. The panoramic and customizations are way better. So I just use that now.

Also lost my picture frame widget, which I loved. But worth it to not have a dead phone anymore. If anyone knows a good photo frame app, I'd love to hear about it. I couldn't find a comparable one, despite a lot of searching.

Hope this helps someone!

 

[GussieS]

My husband and I both had a similar issue but with different apps causing the problem. For me ... a Nike+ app for some reason was running even though I hadn't used it in a long time. I couldn't figure out why it was running, but I force stopped it and now the battery is doing much better. I can't figure out what prompted it to start in the first place.

Anyway, thanks so much for posting this! Very helpful!

 

[Tom Barrister]

I know that this thread is a few weeks old.

Also note that when Google Now is installed or updated, it may enable all sync functions, including Picasa. Therefore, If you install Google Now, or see that Google Now has updated itself, you may want to disable Picasa if you don't use it.

This is another way Gallery can use CPU:

SCREEN CAPTURE: The S3's hotkey combination for a screen capture/dump is the home (lower middle) and power buttons, held for about a second. It's annoyingly easy to inadvertently do this. The phone does make a shutter sound, but you may not notice it if there's a lot of other noise. The captured image goes immediately to Gallery, which stays open in the background. I don't know what Gallery is doing while it's open (i.e. doesn't know what to do with a corrupt image, trying to sync the photo to Picasa, waiting for instructions), but it's doing something that uses up CPU. I deleted the pic, force closed Gallery, and disabled Picasa sync, and the problem went away.