How can I fix my gallery?

[eliasojohansen]

Hi. I just got a Samsung Galaxy S9+ and have to say that I am happy transfering from Apple. One thing though, my gallery is kinda messed up. That means that I have pictures overlapping creating a duplicate which means that I have at least 1 extra picture of a photo. On my iPhone 7 I could easily copy photos from one album to another without it creating a duplicate picture for no reason, but now I have to ask how I can fix this.

I can provite a picture later if you need.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Gallery apps on Android work by having the system scan all storage directories for image files, which are then added to a database file. The Gallery displays images based on this database. So if you have duplicate copies of the same image in various directories on the phone, it will show up multiple times in the gallery.

If you open the gallery app and select one of those duplicates, look at the Info/Details, and see which directory it's in. Are the duplicates in the same directory or different ones?

 

[Rukbat]

A Gallery "album" is the last name of the directory in which the picture file is located, so a picture in /DCIM/Camera/Christmas would be in an "album" named Christmas. If you want that picture in an album named Grandma also, you'd need a copy of it in /DCIM/Camera/Grandma (or wherever the directory is). Copying pictures isn't the same as creating shortcuts to them, which is evidently what the iPhone does. (The only shortcuts available in Android are the ones on your home screen - those aren't the apps, they're shortcuts to the apps.)

Maybe someone will develop (or has already developed) an app that can create shortcuts to picture files (actually, since the system is running in Linux, static links to picture files), but I haven't seen any.