Lost Pictures

[Android Central Question]

Hello, I am hoping someone is able to help me with this dilemma - I have a Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime and after taking some pictures throughout the night, I decided to "move" them to the SD card within the phone to make more room. As it was "moving" the files, it got to 47% and then froze. Moments later the phone restarted and the pictures were completely gone. No longer on the phone camera in gallery or on the SD card. What can I do to get them back!? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Sorry, but the photos are probably lost. It's always a good idea to use the Copy command rather than Move, because Move will cause the original files to be deleted after the operation is complete, even if the operation was unsuccessful or faulty.

A couple of things to try:

1. Using a file manager app, look in the SD card for a directory called LOST.DIR. If it's there, look in the directory for any files that are about the size of a photo file. Try renaming one of them with the suffix ".jpg" and see if it shows up as a pic.

2. If the above doesn't work, see this guide for recovering deleted files: https://forums.androidcentral.com/a...os/500142-guide-recovering-deleted-files.html. It's much more complicated to recover deleted files from Internal Storage (compared with the SD), since the former requires you to root the device.

 

[Rukbat]

With current phone, and at least a few GB of RAM, Move usually reads all the files - then deletes them before pasting them to wherever you tell it to (since it can hold them all in RAM). Some app "developers" take the easy way out and stop thinking. "There's a function for that, so let's not write code we don't have to." The app "knows" where the original picture is, so it can read and write, then delete each one separately, one after the other. Then, if the process fails somewhere, you have to do it again with the remaining files but you don't lose any. Dev apps, are you listening? Making a list if files, then walking it and performing the same set of functions on each one, isn't really hard.

Until then, as B. Diddy said, use copy/paste/delete. You can do all the pictures in a folder, only some of them or one, but copy them, and you won't end up with nothing.