Why aren't my photos / videos / music showing at all?

[imboo]

I have a HTC One M8, I do not have any SD card installed i only use my 16GB of built in storage. I encountered a problem before that some images were saving to my gallery which weren't supposed to be, e.g. Facebook emojis. So i looked up a fix for this and found that I should download "ES File Explorer File Manager" from the play store then create a file called '.nomedia' inside the folder in which all the unnecessarily saving pictures were in. But instead of creating '.nomedia' there I accidentally created it in a much bigger folder, with all my media. Then obviously all my media disappeared. It is still visible in the file explorer, I can still view images, and play music and videos. But it does not show up in my gallery or my music app. It is all only accessible from the file explorer. I have tried all the obvious fixes such as deleting every single '.nomedia' file on my system and in the folders, I have tried numerous SD media scan applications. And i have tried moving my media from the phone to my laptop through android file transfer (which works), then moving it back. But after that it is still only visible inside the ES file explorer. The files are NOT shown as hidden, even if i "hide hidden files" from the explorer they are still all visible to me so i am very confused as to why it isn't showing up in the rest of my phone. The files also do not have periods / dots in before their names. They are shown in the file manager as they would be shown when everything was working perfectly. I just don't know what action to take from here, thank you to anyone who responds, It means a great deal.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Assuming you've found every instance of .nomedia and deleted them, then go to Settings>Apps>All, select Gallery, and Clear Cache/Clear Data. Now open Gallery again, and give it a few seconds for the database to repopulate. Can you see the photos again?