Pictures Lost from Samsung S3

[ChrisCYWG]

Today my Mom went to show some friends a picture and noticed that EVERY picture from yesterday to mid December of 2016 is missing.. the other thousand + pictures are still on the SD card... I took a few pictures and they worked... there was also a picture we didn't know what it was.. a car on a mountain road.... ideas?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! I moved this from the Note 3 forum to the Galaxy S3 forum (unless that S3 was a typo, or you meant the Galaxy Tab S3 tablet).

Does your mother only keep those photos on an SD card? Remember that SD cards are inherently more unreliable than onboard memory, so there's a higher chance of data corruption or loss. Never rely on an SD card as the sole storage location for important data -- always make sure to back it up or sync it on a regular basis to either a computer hard drive or a cloud storage system.

First, install SD Insight to see if the card is genuine or counterfeit. Counterfeit cards are programmed to report more storage than they actually have, and if you try saving more than the card can actually hold, then files can start getting corrupt.

If it's a valid card, then go to Settings>Storage, Unmount the card, remove it, and insert it into your computer. Can the computer read these files? Backup as much as you can right now, then run chkdsk to look for bad sectors: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...guide-using-chkdsk-fix-corrupted-sd-card.html. If it finds bad sectors, and the photos aren't crucial to save, then go ahead and allow chkdsk to try repairing those sectors. If the photos are really precious, then you'll have to try recovering them using 3rd party software: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...os/500142-guide-recovering-deleted-files.html

I strongly suggest taking advantage of the Google Photos Auto Backup feature, which can save you these kinds of headaches in the future: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?hl=en