My Downloaded Photos Randomly Dissappear

[leff]

I have a Samsung Galaxy from Verizon, and it works phenomenally. The biggest grip I have with it though is that at random, my downloads are nowhere to be found. I've tried factory restarting, which worked for a while before I had to update and boom my photos have disappeared. I had ~230 downloaded photos and after the update it went down to 181. I do have backups of all my downloads but not everything that I've lost. Before I factory restarted, this would happen off and on as well. I've read several threads where the answer is something among the lines of, "restart your phone," but that does not work at all. Is there any way to fix this aside from making backups and just restoring the lost data with the backup?

EDIT: I forgot to mention, this has been occurring prior to OREO, thanks

 

[mcaspe1]

My wife's phone does the same thing. S8+ on ATT. OREO update has a lot of glitches.

 

[justnivek]

I thought this said "McDonalds Photos Randomly Disappeared" ahahaha

I go through a problem when I take a picture and exit the camera app to fast it deletes the picture I just took even though I seem it take the picture and go into the gallery icon in the camera app very frustrating

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! If those downloaded photos were all in the /Download directory, then check to see if you have a Device Maintenance app that has a "smart cleaner" option. This kind of option can periodically clear out your Download directory without asking you, if it's set to do so automatically.

 

[leff]

That's actually great lmao

Yeah same thing happens to me with the camera app. I just have to wait a bit for the picture to appear in the bottom right then I exit the app.

 

[leff]

Welcome to Android Central! If those downloaded photos were all in the /Download directory, then check to see if you have a Device Maintenance app that has a "smart cleaner" option. This kind of option can periodically clear out your Download directory without asking you, if it's set to do so automatically.

I don't think I have one. If an S8 would be preinstalled with one, what would it be called? Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you for welcoming me however!

 

[leff]

My wife's phone does the same thing. S8+ on ATT. OREO update has a lot of glitches.

I'm pretty sure my old phone aka a Samsung Galaxy J7 from T-Mobile did the same thing even prior to OREO existing.

 

[B. Diddy]

I don't think I have one. If an S8 would be preinstalled with one, what would it be called? Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you for welcoming me however!

This is what I'm thinking of. But if you installed a 3rd party "phone cleaner" app, that could also do stuff like this.

 

[leff]

This is what I'm thinking of. But if you installed a 3rd party "phone cleaner" app, that could also do stuff like this.

Would it be something like this?

 

[B. Diddy]

Sorry, I just realized I didn't post the link in my previous post: https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...port%2Fanswer%2FANS00062587%2F&token=qZAeqtfH. And yes, what you posted is what I was thinking of.

Tap the menu button at the upper right -- is there any option to automate the cleaning process?

 

[leff]

https://imgur.com/a/OkE5Ri0
Sorry if this is inconvenient, but here's the album.

 

[B. Diddy]

Hmm, I don't see any option there for automating the cleaning process. I know that some LG phones had this "feature," which is why I was pursuing it.

As a temporary workaround, what happens if you make a habit of moving downloaded photos and other files from the /Download directory to some other directory immediately? Move downloaded photos to the /Pictures directory, music to the /Music directory, etc.

 

[leff]

Sorry for not replying back, but the last purge just happened so lets see if I move them to my photos directory.

 

[atthattime768]

Just posting to confirm this is happening. I have no SD card installed or third party cleaners. I downloaded 158 photos yesterday and immediately created a new folder in the gallery and moved them there, confirmed they were there, and then went to bed. I suspected this would happen so I took extra note of everything I was doing.

I did not turn my phone off overnight.

This morning, I went to check up on those photos and that album was no longer present in Gallery. I checked in the file manager to see if the folder still exists and it does, but it now has zero files.

Has anyone found a solution for this issue?

Galaxy S8+
Android version 8.0.0

EDIT:
This does not happen to photos that are automatically placed in folders by their source app. Twitter, Tumblr, and Pixiv apps put their photos in folders named after the app and I have not lost any pictures from these three folders.

All the photos I lose come from the regular download album and they are lost after moving to them to currently existing albums or newly made ones.

This usually occures with large numbers of photos (30+) moved at one time but it can be as small as 4 (that I've seen)