storage shows less available space than I have calculated

[Android Central Question]

when I calculated the size off all my images videos and gifs, and added them together, I came to about 1.3 gigs, however, my phone says theres 2.6 gigs of photos on my device. It also says I have 1.4 gigs of games, although if I open the category it shows no apps (I moved all my games to an SD-card), not even system apps.

does anyone know if there are hidden files that may be causing this, or if its a bug and also knows how to resolve it?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Which phone? Unless you formatted your card as Internal Storage, you can't move an entire app to the SD card. The Move to SD feature only moves a portion of an app to the SD card, and a significant (often still large) portion of the app needs to remain on Internal Storage.

The .thumbnails folder that the system creates can often become pretty big, depending on how many photos are in your gallery. It can get into the several hundred MB range in size, maybe even a GB.

 

[Maxvd]

its a nokia 5, and as far as i know the SD is formatted as internal storage. the apps that i moved display on the SD but not on the normal storage. theres also a problem with the SD card storage, somehow the catagory "other" is -3.2 gb, i have no idea how this is possible even more because it actually has stuff in it.

(i created an account but im the one that asked the question, just so you know)

 

[B. Diddy]

Show us a screenshot of the Settings>Storage menu: http://forums.androidcentral.com/ge...ide-how-post-screenshots-android-central.html

 

[Maxvd]

First screenshot: SD card
Second screenshot: Internal storage
Third screenshot: overall storage

translation:
andere/overige = other
afbeeldingen = pictures

 

[B. Diddy]

As mentioned before, the missing photo data could be due to a combination of image and video files cached by apps that you use (that wouldn't be in your Camera's /DCIM/Camera directory) and the thumbnails database that all devices create (in the /DCIM/.thumbnails) directory. You can always delete the thumbnails temporarily, but the system will create them again on an as needed basis.

Do you actually have a lot of games installed? If so, it might just be that the system menu doesn't work quite right, or isn't designed to show you the actual files.

"Other" can include a lot of things (it might be called "Miscellaneous" on other phones). Just because it's "Other" doesn't mean it's unimportant -- it's probably various data important to the system and to other apps.

You can get a better idea of what's using space with DiskUsage.