HELP! Phone is removing pictures!

[MikeyBugs95]

Ok, so I'm on vacation in Canada and I was reviewing some pictures when I noticed that a dozen or so pictures couldn't be displayed. It seems they were corrupted or something damaged them. I save all my pictures to my 128Gb SD card so that may be the cause but I'm not sure. I restarted my phone but then I saw that all the pictures from yesterday and parts of Monday were gone (including pictures of Niagra Falls ). Now to avoid further damage I've started moving my pictures to my phone storage but I want to know if those removed pictures are recoverable. I checked the gallery trash but there was nothing. Can anyone help me? I did get the phone a bit wet when I took some pictures of the falls but it wasn't too wet and it didn't get submerged. Only misted slightly. It has a case on so I think that should've protected it some.

 

[GSDer]

Personally I wouldn't make the SD card the default storage for anything that I highly valued (like pictures) - use the internal storage for that purpose. SD cards are too subject to corruption for my liking.

Feel free to use the SD card for storing music, movies, etc (stuff that you have backed up or in the cloud).

 

[Mike Dee]

Personally I wouldn't make the SD card the default storage for anything that I highly valued (like pictures) - use the internal storage for that purpose. SD cards are too subject to corruption for my liking.

Feel free to use the SD card for storing music, movies, etc (stuff that you have backed up or in the cloud).

I hear that once in awhile, however I've never had a problem with removable storage of any format and I've been using removable storage over 15 years. I don't anything without backing it up just in case.

 

[GSDer]

Your experience has been different than mine then. I've had several different phones, with SD cards from different (brand name) manufacturers, and in each case I've had issues with file corruption, the phone reporting that it: couldn't access the SD card, didn't recognize the SD card, couldn't format the SD card, etc.

Back when my Samsung Galaxy S3 was brand new I purchased a 64GB SD card (this was when they just came out - spent big bucks on it) and enabled encryption on it. It immediately became a paperweight - couldn't use it in the phone, couldn't reformat it (in the phone or on a computer) - it was just useless. Needless to say I've never messed with encryption on an SD card again.

YMMV.

 

[natehoy]

You can try pulling the SD card from the phone and putting it in a computer. It's possible that the files are still there, but the corruption has prevented Android from recognizing them as pictures. They may still be recoverable.

However, for the duration of your trip I would remove the SD card from the phone (writing to it more might make any potentially recoverable pictures toast, and of course the SD card has proven itself untrustworthy anyway).

I'd also suggest (if you aren't already) using Google Photos backup starting as soon as you can - they allow unlimited pictures for free as long as you allow them to compress the photos a bit (and I have yet to see ANY difference in quality whatsoever - having said that I rarely print photos beyond 8"x10") and it all happens automagically every time you connect to WiFi - or even cell data if you enable it and have enough data allowance to support it.

 

[Mike Dee]

Ok, so I'm on vacation in Canada and I was reviewing some pictures when I noticed that a dozen or so pictures couldn't be displayed. It seems they were corrupted or something damaged them. I save all my pictures to my 128Gb SD card so that may be the cause but I'm not sure. I restarted my phone but then I saw that all the pictures from yesterday and parts of Monday were gone (including pictures of Niagra Falls ). Now to avoid further damage I've started moving my pictures to my phone storage but I want to know if those removed pictures are recoverable. I checked the gallery trash but there was nothing. Can anyone help me? I did get the phone a bit wet when I took some pictures of the falls but it wasn't too wet and it didn't get submerged. Only misted slightly. It has a case on so I think that should've protected it some.

You can try to run a file recovery app on your phone or PC

 

[Laura Knotek]

I hear that once in awhile, however I've never had a problem with removable storage of any format and I've been using removable storage over 15 years. I don't anything without backing it up just in case.

Same here. I use only Sandisk and Samsung cards, and neither have gone bad. I also back up my pictures to Google Drive and OneDrive, in addition to backing up on an external hard drive.

 

[natehoy]

You can try to run a file recovery app on your phone or PC

The one small warning I would add to that is - back up what is there and readable now, before trying to recover anything. You don't want to be in a position where you lose the good pictures in an attempt to recover the corrupted ones.

Once SD cards start to suffer corruption failures, things can get a little weird and a write to one file can corrupt another because of the way updates and deletes happen in static memory and its by-block addressing.

 

[MikeyBugs95]

You can try pulling the SD card from the phone and putting it in a computer. It's possible that the files are still there, but the corruption has prevented Android from recognizing them as pictures. They may still be recoverable.

However, for the duration of your trip I would remove the SD card from the phone (writing to it more might make any potentially recoverable pictures toast, and of course the SD card has proven itself untrustworthy anyway).

I'd also suggest (if you aren't already) using Google Photos backup starting as soon as you can - they allow unlimited pictures for free as long as you allow them to compress the photos a bit (and I have yet to see ANY difference in quality whatsoever - having said that I rarely print photos beyond 8"x10") and it all happens automagically every time you connect to WiFi - or even cell data if you enable it and have enough data allowance to support it.

Thanks. Unfortunately, the photos that appeared with the broken link icon I deleted, not thinking much of it. But I'll try that with the rest. And I've already bought a new SD card. No problems so far. Keeping my fingers crossed. I'll also enable Google Photos.

 

[ansa82]

When that happened to me my sd card was failing. Get those pics in the cloud and get a new sd card

 

[MikeyBugs95]

Well I'm now backing up all my pictures to Google Photos but I'm unable to recover the lost pictures. I'll try using a recovery tool later to see if that works and then take it to a professional if need be. But unfortunately they may be gone.