Android Phone Took Over 1,800 Blank Pictures in 21 minutes on its own - LG VS876

[AC Question]

A week ago, my wife complained that her phone, a LG VS876 from Verizon, was running out of space. She cleaned out the junk she thought was causing the storage issues and everything seemed okay.

When she went to upload photos to Facebook on her phone, she couldn't find the picture in the gallery because it appeared all of her pictures turned into blanks! They were just black pictures as far as she could scroll in the Gallery app.

So I plugged the phone into my computer and browsed its pictures. The good news is that the pictures she took were there and intact. The bad news was that there were over 1,800 of these black/blank pictures!

I did some further file research and found that the phone created 1,852 of these black pictures between 6:39 PM and 6:58 PM on Tuesday, February 23, 2016. This is around the time her storage issues manifested as all these black pictures took up 1.34 GB of space! The thing I find unsettling was that the phone was just sitting face-up on our coffee table the whole time, not being touched or anything.

So what happened to this phone that caused it to take so many of these black pictures? Is there a way to prevent this?

 

[Golfdriver97]

Welcome to the forums. Not exactly sure what happened, but one thing I would do is check to see if there is a .nomedia file on your device. That might help.

 

[BLR-IIC]

I am the original question poster. There was no .nomedia file in any of my picture directories.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Did adding that file help?

 

[BLR-IIC]

Hello again. No, deleting the .nomedia file didn't work. I had to manually delete the blank pictures.
It happened again today with the same phone. Got the disk space warning and found that the phone took 3,886 black pictures all on its own on 3/28/2016 between 5:09 PM and 5:49 PM. The phone took one black picture on 3/25/2016 at 7:35 AM. All these photos take up 1.87 GB and each one is 502 kb to 507 kb in size.

The phone was on during these times, and locked. When it took the pictures on 3/28, it was sitting in my wife's bag next to her personal phone. I deleted these blank pictures manually.

The file names of these pictures consist of a 10-digit number, then a letter, and a 1 or 2-digit number in brackets, so it looks like this: 1234567890a[20]. The letter toward the end of the file name seems to go straight through the alphabet sometimes. The number in the brackets seems to top out at 66.

What is this stupid phone doing? :-\