HTC One M9, Android 6, no photos/songs in Gallery/Music after SD card change

[Wojciehowicz]

I decided to switch to a faster SD card of the same size, 128GB. I unmounted the original, turned the phone off, then removed the card and put it in an adapter to use on my PC. I then backed up everything on my PC drive. So far so good.

Next up, I put the new card in and started the phone and on boot completion I chose to format as internal. It did its thing, I followed the prompts, and soon it was ready and I hooked the phone up to my PC. It saw the phone's new storage and let me begin dumping my music and photos back onto the phone. I copied and pasted the DCIM and Music folders to it and everything went across the USB link smoothly.

I rebooted the phone and even after a few hours, no media. File explorers saw the files. My PC saw the files. Gallery and Music did not. Neither did VLC until I selected the folders option. In folder mode, it saw everything. Having been through this on Android 5, I went to Media Storage, cleared data, and did the same for Music and Gallery, and then rebooted. I waited overnight and still no dice.

I tried two media rescan apps from the store, still no change.

So, I deleted as much as I could from the SD card, uninstalling legions of apps, and finally cleared enough space to migrate the SD data back to the internal space and once done, formatted the SD card as external and for good measure I unmounted it, then repeated the clearing of the media storage data and the others, rebooting.

Still no dice. Remember now, the music and photos are on the internal space so it shouldn't be an SD card or external vs internal formatting issue.

That being the case, I reformatted the card as internal, following the menu option to migrate the data back. I reinstalled all the apps I needed. The apps run nice and fast from this new SD card. But, Android 6 media storage is just not indexing the media. No pictures in Gallery. No music in Music. All files are there per both PC and the phone's own file managers.

And yes, I looked for .nomedia entries in the affected places. Nothing. Before, Gallery showed stuff downloaded on Twitter and Facebook. Music would see music in the Download folder and I had playlists aplenty. All the media was being seen.

As I said, I had this happen on the Android 5 load the phone came with once. For some reason it would occasionally lose media storage data on a reboot. I did extensive searching and this dumping of the media storage data was the eventual fix. However, it should index overnight. If it is taking more than eight hours, something is off. The problem went away with the Android 6 upgrade but here I am again.

I have once more cleared the data on Media Storage, Gallery, and Music and rebooted and the phone is sitting untouched. I'm afraid it isn't going away this time.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Pictures taken by the camera show in Gallery, but none of the older ones. ONLY those taken SINCE the SD card install.

EDIT: As to numbers, I have about 6GB of music and 8GB of photos and downloaded pictures.

 

[Wojciehowicz]

UPDATE: There wasn't a single .nomedia file to be found anywhere from root of the SD card to the various media folders. Repeated connections to my PC to scour it showed nothing. Repeated clearing of data and forced rescans. I checked the size of the Media Storage data and it consistently was indexing something, but nothing showed in Gallery or Music.

I checked one more time and found a .nomedia file now in the root of the SD card. It was NOT there before. I didn't see it when hooked to the PC despite setting it to show hidden files. Suddenly, the phone's native file explorer was showing it. I deleted it, rescanned, and presto. Music and photos were in Music and Gallery.

Android devs REALLY REALLY REALLY need to upgrade the Media Storage app and revamp it so that you can actually select it as an app, see what it has indexed, tell it to reindex if needed, and show you which folders are reporting a .nomedia file and so forth. A simple graphical interface to show the database and what the status was.