Help: Random photos suddenly vanished from Gallery

[markey164]

Fairly new to Android, and struggling with this one.

Have had my Galaxy S7 for 6 weeks and taken about 300 or so photos. Yrsterday, I noticed a lot of them have randomly vanished from my gallery.

Eg Last Sunday I took about 30 photos at a car show. They were all there until yesterday when there are only about 5 left from that day. Lots of others have randomly vanished.

No one else, kids etc use my phone and I know I didn't do it either.

It's possible it coincided with an overnight system update I ran a day or two before.

Has anyone seen this before?

Is there anyway I can get them back?

TIA

 

[maykelbembibre]

That is a common issue in Samsung starting from 2016. I think you ought to disable built in gallery and download another different one from the Google Play. I used to use Quikpic.

 

[markey164]

Ok thanks I'll look into that.
Any idea what the actual issue/bug is?
Are they lost or is there anyway I can get them back?
I tried a reboot and clearing the system cache, the latter bought some of them back, but there's still around 100 missing I reckon!!

 

[maykelbembibre]

All the photos are still stored inside your device, but the algorithm of the gallery that is responsible for locate them in the directory structure is a dud.

As of you use another different gallery appilcation which has got its own location algorithms you will be able to navigate through all of your photos again.

 

[Chipstak]

Ok thanks I'll look into that.
Any idea what the actual issue/bug is?
Are they lost or is there anyway I can get them back?
I tried a reboot and clearing the system cache, the latter bought some of them back, but there's still around 100 missing I reckon!!

Hey markey.. I had the same issue using a huawei ascend mate 2 ... sometimes all pics in stock gallery wud disappear.. few days later they slowly came back. .. I use A+ gallery as a backup. U shud check it out... it's very nice....

 

[markey164]

So I installed Quickly, unfortunately this doesnt show me the missing photos.

I installed Total Commander and can see thumbnails of the missing photos in Internal Storage/DCIM/.thumbnails but of course this is only small versions of the photos.

There were 3 other folders present in DCIM (Camera, Facebook, screenshots) but these don't show the missing photos either, in fact the photos folder in DCIM only show about half of the photos I can still see in the gallery!!

No idea what's going on. Are photos being stored somewhere else? Are my photos lost?

I've used Apple for the last 6years and had been enjoying my switch to Android so far, but I never had these issues wjth my photos with Apple

 

[Chipstak]

So I installed Quickly, unfortunately this doesnt show me the missing photos.

I installed Total Commander and can see thumbnails of the missing photos in Internal Storage/DCIM/.thumbnails but of course this is only small versions of the photos.

There were 3 other folders present in DCIM (Camera, Facebook, screenshots) but these don't show the missing photos either, in fact the photos folder in DCIM only show about half of the photos I can still see in the gallery!!

No idea what's going on. Are photos being stored somewhere else? Are my photos lost?

I've used Apple for the last 6years and had been enjoying my switch to Android so far, but I never had these issues wjth my photos with Apple

Try A+ gallery. .. after installing u can scan for all media.. which shud show everything including the missing pics.

 

[maykelbembibre]

Try A+ gallery. .. after installing u can scan for all media.. which shud show everything including the missing pics.

Since you are in trouble then you should keep on looking for the photos with your file manager until you make this clear. Think that there are several directories in which the images could be, there is a DCIM directory in the internal memory but also in the SD card. Did you set up your camera application so that the photos get stored internally or in memory card? If it is the latter, then I would insert the card in a computer and test it copying some files to see if it could be spoilt. When a memory card says good bye, files tend to disappear.

 

[markey164]

Try A+ gallery. .. after installing u can scan for all media.. which shud show everything including the missing pics.

Ok I installed A+ Gallery. It scanned and found all available photos itself (although I also ran a manual scan to be sure), Still no missing photos unfortunately.
As mentioned earlier, I did run through the process of clearing the system cache which returned 'some' of the missing photos but many others are still missing.
There were over 300 photos in my gallery before this happened, now there are only 53, so I've lost over 250. And there's no doubt in my mind this was a system error based on only random photos going missing and others still being there. Plus I just know I didn't do it.
Is there any software anyone can recommend to try and recover them? I've had a quick look and there seem to be so many junk ones out there. Just wandered if anyone has first hand experience and can recommend one!!
or anything else I can try!
TIA

 

[chanchan05]

This is a weird issue, however I will say DO NOT USE QUICKPIC. It's been taken over by Cheetah Mobile.

Anyway, you should look through the My Files app and see if you can find the photos. If not, they were inadvertently deleted for some reason. I've experienced this as there seems to be a problem with the backup using Samsung Cloud regarding photos. If you also activated Google Photo Backup, your photos should be there.