Camera folder disappeared from DCIM, but pics are still in the phone!

[Larryyl]

Hi everyone and thanks in advance for any help you can offer. I just switched phone companies and got a new ZTE blade phone, so I am going to give my old ZTE Z958 to my friend who is still using a flip phone. I removed my SD card and put it in my new phone and some of my pictures went with it but those that were in the Camera folder in DCIM stayed in the phone. They are in there. I can access them with Gallery but the camera folder in DCIM that they were in is gone! When viewing them in gallery the location path says they are in "Phone/DCIM/Camera" but when I connect via usb to my Windows 7 computer, as I have always done in the past, and go to Explorer, then open the phone, I see all the folders including DCIM but when I try to open DCIM there is nothing there, but "Camera" was there before. There are some pics in there I would really like to save before doing a factory reset. My ATT account is no longer so I can't get the phone online to download any software at this time. Please Help!

 

[JAy3001]

This can could down to having the wrong setting on the USB options. With my S8+ when connecting via USB i had to select Transfer Images for my files to show up rather than just Transfer.

Since upgrading to Oreo my Samsung will present me with a popup asking me if I want to share my files. If I don't see this, IE I've already pulled down the options bar to select USB settings nothing will show.

 

[Larryyl]

This can could down to having the wrong setting on the USB options. With my S8+ when connecting via USB i had to select Transfer Images for my files to show up rather than just Transfer.

Since upgrading to Oreo my Samsung will present me with a popup asking me if I want to share my files. If I don't see this, IE I've already pulled down the options bar to select USB settings nothing will show.

Thanks for the quick reply. I tried switching to "Picture Transfer Protocol" and now it only shows the DCIM and Pictures folders in windows explorer but still no "Camera" floder in DCIM.

 

[JAy3001]

Ok, so just to be clear..

On your old phone you had the camera set to save your photos to the internal storage? Correct?

You then simply took the SD card out your old phone and put it in your new phone and found the dcim folder without your camera photos? Correct? (This is normal as the system creates these folders by default, but remain empty until you tell your camera app to save to SD card.)

If this is the case simply put your SD card back in the old phone and using a file browser copy all your photos from the internal space to your SD card. Now place the SD card back in the new phone and see if they appear.

 

[Larryyl]

When I got the phone new I put the 16g SD card in it but I never directed the camera to use it. Somehow, over the last 2 years the camera put some pics in the phones memory and some on the card without my instruction as I didn't know I needed to do that. I used to access the "camera" folder located within the DCIM folder via my Windows 7 computer to copy pics for posting to Craigslist, emails and such. Now the DCIM folder is empty yet when I view the details of any of the image files while viewing them in "gallery", the path indicates they are in "phone/DCIM/camera".

I tried putting the SD card back in the phone and another DCIM with a camera folder exists there and has the other group of pics, but still the camera folder in the phone memory remains MIA.