Photos / Gallery ~ SD Card or Phone saved

[Eric95403]

I thought I was safe, but now I realize I might be in a bit of trouble. I was saving my photos to my SD card on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Within my Gallery, I had a number of subfolders. In the past, when I created a subfolder, I copied the photos and transferred them to the new subfolder. Lately, I've just been moving the photos w/o copying them. I assumed I was moving them w/in the SD card into a separate folder. I did a mass move today while on a flight and had some time to kill.

Shortly after my flight, I damaged my phone and now a portion of the LCD screen is out (The bottom third where I need to enter my numerical password is green/black). I pulled out my SD card to ensure my photos were safe. The photos on the SD card were the photos NOT saved to subfolders. Are these photos on the phone? I did find several subfolders where I might have made copies of the photos, thus making me realize my possible mistake. Is that what happened or do I need to do a thorough scan of my SD card to find those photos (I didn't see them).

If that's the case, I just have to hope to be able to get access into the phone to get the photos.

 

[Rukbat]

1) Gallery has no folders in the phone's filesystem, it has "folders" of pictures that bear some relationship to the folders the pictures are in.

2) Removing the SD card while the phone is running, unless you unmounted it first, can corrupt it.

3) There's no telling where the pictures are, because there's no way for us to know where they were. Being showwn in a folder in Gallery doesn't tell you which folder in the filesystem the picture file is in.

Download PhotoRec. Burn it to a CD. Put the SD card into a card reader and connect that to the computer. Restart the computer, using the CD. (You'll probably see a prompt something like "Press any key to boot from CD". Press a key.)

Tell PhotoRec to recover from the SD card. It'll recover any pictures that are on it, even if the file system on the card is damaged. (It'll recover any other files it finds too, so have at least as much empty space on the drive you're recovering to as the size of the SD card.)

As far as pictures on the phone but not on the SD card, about the only practical thing to do is temporarily replace the screen (which is why it's good to be friendly with your local independent cellphone repair shop). Or you could have them put your motherboard into an S4 with a good screen but a burned out motherboard. Either way, you need your motherboard and a working screen. Then you use an app like ES File Explorer to find all the pictures and copy them to your computer.

BTW, moving a file is doing two things - copy, then delete. If a move goes bad, there's no copy but the original file still gets deleted. Is there a way of recovering deleted files on internal storage? Yes. You need a rooted phone, and you need a deleted file recovery app, like DiskDigger (I've used it - it works). However, rooting and installing an app can overwrite the deleted files, so if you think you may accidentally delete files, you should root the phone and install a recovery program first. Recovering an overwritten file usually gives you the beginning of the file - the first quarter, half, 9/10ths, whatever wasn't overwritten. If the beginning was overwritten it usually can't be recovered.