I have tried all that I found posted on web sights trying to correct this problem, I found with mine that the second sd card I running on my gal 3, had about three pics on it, and my sd card that came with phone had all the rest of my pics, I deleted the pics off my ext sd card and my problem went away, done this two weeks ago, no freezing, no problem with gallery at all, hopes this helps.
I too came to the conclusion it's the external memory (SD-card) that allowed this issue to happen. Because when removing the SD-card from the phone, this issue did not occur. I use the Samsung Galaxy S4 ( I9505 / 16GB internal memory). Before updating to JellyBean 4.3 this did not happen, this may or may not be a coincidence, though I think it is. I have a Kingston 8GB SD card. Deleting a few files like John says is an option according to his post, but I would suggest you just save what you can, delete what is corrupted and format the external memory. This might be time consuming, but at least you keep some of your valued memories and you are sure about a fresh start.
Below I wrote down all my actions of the last few hours, some sort of a journal you might say. But first I make it a short version ( All actions are at your own risk, but I don't see any mayor risks to take into account):
- If possible save your files from the SD card (ext mem.) to your computer. When saving gets stuck or ends premature, abort and try again excluding the file it was last working on (most likely file first listed). Depending on how important a file might be to you you might try it a few times with one file at a time before you give up/in and delete what's left.
- Delete corrupted files that won't open/copy/move. (Yes gone for ever. Be my guest to search and find some repair or retrieval tool, but perhaps that makes this whole process obsolete)
- Then format the SDcard (I chose first NTSF on Notebook, then another formatting on the device that will standard make it FAT32)
- Rewrite all data back from computer
- Finally place back SD into device
...and now you should be fine again. Of course use 'save methods to remove' the card from device and/or computer.
If you do not have computer, you can just save data from external to internal memory, or on some cloud if you wish and perform the formatting of the EXTERNAL(!!!) memory from device. So all can be done without removing SD from device. I'm no wizzkid, so if someone has any comment about this procedure I'm not offended. Perhaps someone with more skills could rewrite this into an even better help-guide. I would not have come to this post without the post of John, so thank you John!
I would not suggest, I repeat NOT suggest, a factory reset. All you loose is all you care about (pictures, data, etc.) but the issue remains. I found out the hard way! And yes I backup up the works, but still you loose like pictures from WhatsApp and stuff.
My Journal:
John's suggestion sounds sane. Working on it now. Atm only 83 pics on the SD and the relocation is no fun. The process crashes multiple times. And so far only 34 have been transferred. Perhaps one or more area's of the SD are damaged and so I try to skip one or two here and there. The process of transferring a few MB's is slow at it's best. Atm I transferred 7 pictures in about 2 or 3 minutes. Which translates to about 7MBytes per minute or 2KBytes p/sec. Which is sloooooooooooooooooow..... At some point during the first 34 pictures about 25 pictures went in a few seconds. So I will check the SD card for memory damage after the pictures have been moved. And after I made a back up of all other data on the SD card. Come to think of it sometimes my music doesn't load as well. Or so I think, it just might be 'paranoia' now. Another 17 pics have been moved in last 9 minutes. This time I clocked it. So actual transfer rate is about 1KB/s. I think that's weird because if an area is damaged it just should move at all. Let's hope I can save all data and after that a 'format' would do the trick. When the photos have been moved I will move the SD to my laptop. I have more confidence copying the files will go faster and the formatting process will too. another 9 pictures too another 6 minutes. 3 pictures get stuck and I get a failure report. I have to consider them corrupted. Hopefully they were saved to Dropbox before issues occurred.
At the moment I'm moving a little over 2,5 GB of music to my computer. A nice 13,6-14,13 MB/s transfer rate is now fact. However when I tried to move the other folders it did not go so well. So I copied what I could and left the rest there. No problems with the music, so any issues with that must have been some side effect or what ever. Hopefully It will not return.
After some research I decided to first format to NTSF in the Notebook, then put it in the SG-S4 to format it into FAT32 again. Then back into the laptop/notebook too put the saved data back. At first it seemed not to be recognized but clearly that was human error, because after taking it out, some wiping and huffing and puffing I put it back and it got recognized immediately. I'm not entirely sure what size of cluster I used, I know it was 4096 when formatting to NTSF. Don't know what Android made it into with the FAT32. 32 seems logic, but I'm sure my phone knows best what's best.
Unfortunately writing started at 1,8 MB/s and is now half way through at about 3,9MB/s. At about 90% of placing data back on the SD it was at about 4,1MB/s. But to be fair, I only paid 7,99 euro for this card. However 2,55 GB now takes a bit longer to copy. But it's normal writing is slower then reading. So no problem there.
Music works fine. Feels like it works faster atm, but that might not be true, just the experience. So.... the real test was taking pictures and then open them from Camera, My Documents/Files (in Dutch: 'Mijn bestanden') en of course from Galery. All 3 options gave a satisfying result. So I'm happy again!
Hope you got it back to normal too.
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