[AC Question]

So I had a bunch of important pictures in my .thumbnails folder (the one in the DCIM folder) on my MAXX HD, and when I updated my phone to kitkat about a month ago, the folder was empty.

Was everything moved to a different folder? Or was it all just deleted? I had something pretty important in there that I need so any help would be appreciated!

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Did you manually place a photo in the .thumbnails folder, or was it in your DCIM/Camera folder? The .thumbnails folder is a system-controlled folder, which holds thumbnails created by the system for easier viewing in the galleries. I would guess that the system cleared out that folder with the KitKat update.

[nsnewcomer]

Welcome to Android Central! Did you manually place a photo in the .thumbnails folder, or was it in your DCIM/Camera folder? The .thumbnails folder is a system-controlled folder, which holds thumbnails created by the system for easier viewing in the galleries. I would guess that the system cleared out that folder with the KitKat update.

OP here just made an account. I didn't manually place it. It was taken from a video that I took on the same day and deleted it but the thumbnail was still kept in the thumbnails folder.

So there is no way I could possibly get the contents of that folder back?

[B. Diddy]

Thumbnails are only small single images--so the thumbnail of the video in the .thumbnail folder was likely just a single image (what you'd see in the Gallery). It's doubtful that it was the whole video. If you deleted the actual video, then it's pretty much gone. I suppose you could search the web for some kind of forensic tools to recover lost data, but much of the stuff that's advertised is a little questionable.

[nsnewcomer]

Thumbnails are only small single images--so the thumbnail of the video in the .thumbnail folder was likely just a single image (what you'd see in the Gallery). It's doubtful that it was the whole video. If you deleted the actual video, then it's pretty much gone. I suppose you could search the web for some kind of forensic tools to recover lost data, but much of the stuff that's advertised is a little questionable.

The single image is what I am looking for. I don't think a recovery tool would work, since I had it in the thumbnails folder on my previous MAXX HD, and now I have a replacement due to water damage. I copied every single piece of data from my old MAXX HD to my computer though, just incase there was a possibility that the thumbnails could have been moved instead of deleted.