Exclamation mark with grey background in gallery

[dowonkim]

I was trying to free up some storage by deleting some apps, and suddenly all my images got corrupted and all I could see was a bunch of grey images with exclamation marks. So I came here, and one guy said: clear cache. So I cleared gallery cache and went into recovery mode to "wipe system cache" and rebooted my phone, and now the images are COMPLETELY GONE. Before I did what that guy said, the corrupted images were occupying tens of gigabytes of my storage, but now the storages is all freed up because even the traces of my images are gone. Why has this happened, what made that person give such advice, and what can I do to restore my images? Thank you.

 

[El Presidente]

Wiping cache is a pretty standard response to a number of Android issues. There's nothing wrong with the advice (it's helped literally thousands of members in the past) and if wiping the cache caused the images to disappear, then there was an underlying issue which would mean they would have been deleted at some point anyway. They were probably already gone and because their info was cached, you saw the exclamation icons, wiping cache just told the system to stop preloading their info.

Were they backed up anywhere? Google Photos or elsewhere? Try logging in here to see if they are there - https://photos.google.com/

Failing that, how does the Note 5 handle internal memory? Does it simulate an SD Card or is the system partition separated and the other storage is just shown as one partition?

 

[dowonkim]

My mom and I thought we deactivated Google photos or whatever but apparently it was still working and all her photos were backed up there thanks anyways!