(S8+) Created new photo album and lost all my pictures

[Android Central Question]

I created a new album to gather up all my pictures of my pups. After selecting them all I chose to MOVE them as opposed to copy. After doing this it did move them, then as I was sitting there on the album selection screen I watched all the pictures drain away from both their original locations and the album itself.

Can anyone tell me what in the world happened? Can I get my pictures back, and how can I stop this from happening again?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! When you say you created a new album, do you mean a new directory on your phone's storage? Was it on Internal Storage or an SD card? Which file manager were you using to move the files -- My Files, or was the phone connected to your PC via USB and you were using Windows Explorer?

The best way to prevent this from happening in the future is to use Copy, never Move. If something goes wrong with the Copy operation, you won't lose the source files.

 

[Uncle Wrukus]

Welcome to Android Central! When you say you created a new album, do you mean a new directory on your phone's storage? Was it on Internal Storage or an SD card? Which file manager were you using to move the files -- My Files, or was the phone connected to your PC via USB and you were using Windows Explorer?

The best way to prevent this from happening in the future is to use Copy, never Move. If something goes wrong with the Copy operation, you won't lose the source files.

I created a new album through the phone's default gallery, and it was on internal storage (don't have an sd card)

 

[B. Diddy]

Use your My Files app to look directly in the /DCIM/Camera directory (assuming these photos were taken by the phone's camera app) -- do you see any of the files there?

 

[Uncle Wrukus]

Yup, they were taken with the default camera app, and they are not in the DCIM location either

 

[B. Diddy]

I'm afraid I'm a little handicapped here, since I don't personally use an S8. Creating albums can mean one of two things -- creating a separate directory on the phone's file/folder hierarchy, or creating a virtual album that only the gallery app sees (which is I think how Samsung's Gallery app usually works). If it's the latter, then the photo files should have remained in the /DCIM/Camera directory (and the new album would be denoted by some kind of flag in the photo file's data that only the Gallery app would read). If it's the former, then use the My Files app to look for a directory somewhere with that name. The former method would also increase the risk of data loss with a Move File command, as previously mentioned.