Samsung Galaxy S5 .thumbnails folder - can I permanently move to SD card?

A

AC Question

Hello,

I have a 16gb Galaxy S5 running on android 6.0.1 which is almost full to capacity. I have moved over as much as I can to a 200gb SD card. The problem is whatsapp cannot be moved to a storage card and I have 4gb worth of photos and videos. I was reluctantly going to move some of them over to the SD card but when I was going through the device storage to see what else is using the other available 4gb (I have already deleted almost every app that can't be moved to the sd card, camera settings were changed right from the start to save photos etc on sd card and I have disabled as many useless preinstalled apps that I can) and I was surprised to see that my DCIM folder shows as using 2.5gb worth of data. I couldn't work out why until I selected show hidden folders and saw a .thumbnails folder that is currently using up a huge chunk of data. I am not what I consider android savvy (I wouldn't ever dare try and root my phone myself) but I'm not a total technophobe so googled this to see if I can simply move it over to the SD card and/or delete it altogether. I couldn't really find an decent answer to this though.

Ideally, I don't mind keeping the folder and moving it to the SD card and my phone continues to use it from there. I also don't mind just deleting the data as I understand my photos would still be safely stored in their designated file on my SD card. However, from what I understood, if I do this, android will simply recreate the folder on my device as soon as I open the gallery app.

Many of the 'solutions' suggested were to create a text folder and rename it to 'trick' my device so it does not recreate the folder every time I open the gallery. However, those suggesting this were also suggesting using another app to view photos and not the standard gallery. However, I want to be able to keep using the standard gallery. So if I do create a text folder to replace the actual .thumbnails folder, what will happen when I open the gallery? Will I still be able to see my photos? If anyone has the answer to this I would be v grateful if you could explain anything I need to do as simply (or rather in non techie terms) as possible please! Thanks in advance for any help and advice given!