So now that we are close to having S-Off I'm pretty sure I'll be flashing a custom ROM. I've always had issues on prior HTC devices with shoddy looking contact photos when flashing a new ROM. Do we have a way of keeping the High Res photos for our contacts? I'm curious if those Hi Res photos are stored somewhere on the phones internal memory. If that is the case, would there be a way to back them up to the internal SD card using a program like root explorer and then replace the ones that are populated with the new ROM when the phone syncs google account? If so, I believe there is a method that gives temp root. Could we not use that temp root method even though we don't have S-Off at the moment to be able to utilize Root Explorer to back those files up before we S-Off and wipe phone memory? Or maybe HTC has fixed that issue with this device and the photos that sync from google will be the hi res photos we've assigned. Any help would be appreciated.
Well in terms of copying files, system is RO so you should be able to read, or copy, files from it without root. The rest I'll let someone else address as I've never cared about the pictures for contacts, that's all they are. Side note, though, the contacts I've assigned local pics to have stayed the same quality after syncing a fresh flash while the crappy ones stayed crappy from phones long past. It seems to stay at the same quality as its set, now.
Tapatalked from my HTC DNA - ReVolt
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First let me preface my inquiry with a few statements.
Renaming pics was previously an inconvenience but now I make my living with these photos so this has become an absolute nightmare.
I am absolutely so frustrated with what I can only describe as Google's stupidity. For being some of the smartest people in the world they do some things that a three year old would know better.
Also I have tried to do research on this before posting a new thread here, but all I find is outdated piecemeal information .
So please don't judge me. I've tried my best to figure this out without creating a new and/or redundant thread but I need someone who actually knows what is going on and who can explain to me what I can and can't do and how to fix what I've already done and how to set up my process in the future so as to complete my task as efficiently as possible. I mean really, isn't that what the goal of all this digital interaction is supposed to be about?
Now that I got that off my chest, here's my situation:
I work in what I call a "fun" business. I take pics and videos of guests on my phone (Android 4.4.4).
Not being able to rename the pics on the SD card from a garble of random letters and numbers to something identifiable is so STUPID it's incomprehensible. The devices are designed to take thousands of pics and we're told to store the pics on the SD card to save storage space on our devices, but we then can't rename them to something we can identify? Whether this was an accidental oversight or on purpose, my three year old niece would know better than that.
That being said, I do understand that the limitations of 4.4 don't allow third party apps to make certain changes to files on the external storage (SD) card.
So here's my delimma: I moved my pics to the SD card before I realized this limitation. So now I have hundreds of pics I need to post to Facebook, etc., but I need to rename them so I can identify them before I start posting.
Also I'm ASSUMING that I CAN rename a pic that is stored on my device's internal storage. If I am incorrect about that please correct me on that issue before moving forward with a solution.
If that assumption is correct I then am assuming that the easiest fix would be to transfer the pics back to the native internal storage and rename them there.
But again 4.4.4 seems to also limit my ability to move/transfer/copy/paste the pics from the SD card back onto the phone's internal storage.
I have thought about transferring the pics to cloud storage where I can rename them, but then I have two copies of the same pics but with different names, which is another nightmare scenario. (In the end I would like to have a renamed (identifiable) copy of the pics on my phone (SD card preferably, but if not practical, then on my phone's internal storage) and one on the cloud. (Any suggestions on the best cloud storage for pics and videos?)
Then I could (can I?) transfer the renamed pics back to my SD card so I have offline access to the pics. But this seems highly inefficient and time consuming. And then if I did this process then I would need to then continually delete the unrenamed pics because of storage issues on the phone, again inefficient.
And using a desktop is not practical as I'm working remotely and I really need to rename immediately as the pics start piling up quickly.
So my first step is going to be to change the default storage location of the pics to the internal storage of the device so I can test whether or not I can rename the pics immediately.
Whether or not this adjustment works for my future pics, I still have the issue of renaming the pics I have already moved to my SD card.
So........
1. Is there a workaround for renaming the pics on the SD card?
2. If not, is there a workaround for moving the pics back to internal storage? In this case I could use a Windows desktop to facilitate this operation as it should be a one-time operation, assuming I can immediately rename my future pics that I'm now going to store by default on the device's internal storage.
I would greatly appreciate any complete and consider suggestions on how to best address my problems. Thanking you in advance.
Vincent
You are correct that Google revoked the permission for third party apps to write to external storage. The only permanent fix seems to be patching your platform.xml to include media_rw group. Do you have root? If so install sdfix: kitkat writable microsd from the play store, follow the prompts and reboot. As always backup first just in case something goes wrong in the process. And you don't need to keep the app. Worked for me on both 4.4.2 and 5.1.1. Hopefully this helps.
You are also correct that you can copy or move the pictures to internal memory and rename them from there, but you should also be able to use your phone's built-in file manager to rename them on the SD card.
I just can't believe it was that simple. I have several File Manager apps on my phone.
I didn't really think about an Android stock File Manager.
I didn't know which one it even was.
I should have picked up on the error message specific verbiage about "third party apps".
I ran a test on what I believe is the Android stock File Manager app and I think it worked.
I'll test it again later and post back the results.
That was the solution. Just using the stock file manager allowed me to rename pics on the SD card.
Thanx for the help. My life is so much easier now!
Sent from my Z987 using XDA-Developers mobile app
To my misfortune today, I found that all the photos I've taken on my phone with the exception of today's are wiped. Is there a way for me to recover the data? This is a very serious problem as I am in Paris on a trip... thank you all in advance for all your help, and before someone says whether or not I wiped the photos, no, I didn't do any sort of accidental user input to wipe anything...
That's odd. I'm not sure. Do you use Google photos or other service as a backup?
Sent from my LG-H830 using XDA-Developers mobile app
Thanks for the response, I used to on my old phone, but I haven't had a chance to set it up yet at the time. After this impromptu data loss happened, I just set it up again, but it's too late for those lost photos. I don't think it's a hardware corruption on the SD card because my music and gameboy ROMs are intact. I think something in the software just wiped all the photos up to a certain point, that point being the last day of my trip. Anything before it is gone.
deathernater said:
Thanks for the response, I used to on my old phone, but I haven't had a chance to set it up yet at the time. After this impromptu data loss happened, I just set it up again, but it's too late for those lost photos. I don't think it's a hardware corruption on the SD card because my music and gameboy ROMs are intact. I think something in the software just wiped all the photos up to a certain point, that point being the last day of my trip. Anything before it is gone.
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I'm not saying it's impossible that they're deleted, but it's not a very common thing to happen... Did you check that they're not locked in the stock gallery or haven't been renamed to a different file type?
As far as I'm aware, you can't restore deleted files without root.
I just got my photos back using Dr. Fone, root is required to pull the photos straight off but I just took out the SD card and the program can attempt to pull the photos off directly. Out if my 700+ photos only about 20 were permanently corrupted. I totally didn't expect this to happen and I am now curious whether this was Android's fault or LG's. I did have to pay 50 dollars for Dr. Fone.
It is also possible, since you're stating that you were using an SD card, that the card got corrupted. In that case it's not a fault of the phone, most likely
fonix232 said:
It is also possible, since you're stating that you were using an SD card, that the card got corrupted. In that case it's not a fault of the phone, most likely
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Good point, but I'd expect corruption to wipe more than just my photos. I say this because I am storing my music on the phone too, and all that as well as my PSP and Gameboy ROMs are still completely intact. It's like the phone just decided to wipe all my photos up to a certain point.
So I guess a fair warning to all, use some kind of background backup service like Google Photos.
deathernater said:
Good point, but I'd expect corruption to wipe more than just my photos. I say this because I am storing my music on the phone too, and all that as well as my PSP and Gameboy ROMs are still completely intact. It's like the phone just decided to wipe all my photos up to a certain point.
So I guess a fair warning to all, use some kind of background backup service like Google Photos.
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Corruption can happen in various forms. It is completely possible that your file table sectors got corrupted, essentially "deleting" your Photos folder.
There's loads of programs you can use to recover deleted files from drives. This is a good place to start but there are tons. Just be careful where you download them from.
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/best-free-data-recovery-tools-1321723
Yes the problem is the delete icon when you open up the gallery, you can miss one delete of a pic and mistakenly hit select all and boom all pics gone, happened to me on a trip with my g3 i didn't notice it in the spur of the moment taking pictures and when i tried to show of my awesome shots i noticed i deleted alllll of my pics and they were a looooot and i tried to recover them but most got corrupted and the only saved ones were the thumbnail cache for the real pics rendering them useless since they were small
I want to upgrade my non-rooted phone to a new model (specifically, from an HTC M8 to a M10), but I would like to try to transfer as much as the settings/data from my old phone as I can.
It's not rooted (though I plan to root the new one immediately) so that really limits my options.
First of all, would restoring an adb backup to the new phone be a bad idea? Obviously I wouldn't use the -system switch, but would even restoring general data and/or apks this way be a bad idea? If so, are there any better methods one can recommend to backup my app/settings data and restore it to a new phone? I don't mean just stuff like contacts or SMS.
And second, I always use a SD card to store my photos, but after it being in this phone for a few years there are a lot of deleted photos, which results in situations where I would have files like photo0012 photo0013 photo0016 with "gaps" between the file numbers. Since most camera software writes to the first available "number" my photos are going to be a scramble of new and old once I start using them on my new phone. Any good (preferably on PC) apps or recommendations on how I can rename them all in order based on the date they were taken so there won't be any "gaps"?
Should this have been posted on a specific phone's forum? It seemed like a general question to me.
Hi gang!
So, after a couple of years of happily(ish) using my S5, it's started to lag badly (even after wiping) and have started looking for a replacement.
It seems that this really is the only viable option for me, given that I really prefer having spare batteries especially when I'm traveling, and I really can't be bothered with having have to plug my phone in, even if it's to a portable back-up battery. It's also been nice to be able to just buy my own battery whenever the battery starts getting old and doesn't hold a charge as well as it did when new. :highfive:
Anyway, given that this phone doesn't have root yet, there are a few things I wanted to find out before I bite the bullet:
Folder locations: I've been using FolderMount to change the default save locations for some apps to SD card instead of internal storage. These apps do not allow you to change directories within the app, which is why I've been doing this. This has saved my ass whenever the phone itself became non-functional. Is there a way to do this without root on the G5? Or, at the very least, is there a way to manually copy these files from the device (i.e., browse ALL files on the device) to the SD card?
Folder locations (bonus round!): in particular, the data I care about is WhatsApp and Line backups. If any of you guys have specific experience being able to save these files to SD, I'd greatly appreciate any input!
Transfering messages, call log: I've been backing up and restoring SMS and Call Log using TiBu for years. While I also use SMS BackUp+ to also have an automatic fail safe, these apps don't handle group texts very well at all, ergo my reliance on TiBu. I noticed AT&T has an app called AT&T Mobile Transfer -- will this be able to transfer all of my texts/call log? Even if it's in the thousands of texts?
S Health data: Samsung has an S Health application that automatically backs up steps/heart rate data. Is there any way to transfer this data to an LG equivalent?
Those are all that I can think of right now, but any advice would be really appreciated, thanks! :good:
Hello all,
This is my first post here. I did some searching and didn't find a direct answer to this scenario, but my apologies if I missed something.
Recently I used my PC to move files from my phone's internal storage onto a microSD card that was mounted in the device. I used the cut & paste function in Windows explorer (didn't occur to me that I could do it on the phone itself), and did this in batches. Unfortunately since that time I've discovered some of the files are corrupted--they have the appropriate size, but can't be opened. Perhaps there is a way to analyze the file structure of the JPEG to see if a byte is missing, but aside from that, I'm interested if I can run TestDisk on the internal phone storage in some way to see if the files could possibly be recovered. I found a few tutorials (example: https://roubert.name/joakim/androidfilerecovery/), but all of them require rooting, and unfortunately my phone is not rooted.
From my review of the procedures on this forum, it seems that unlocking the bootloader and/or rooting ends up requiring that the phone be wiped. Is there any way around this? And does anyone have any other suggestions on investigating whether my photos can be recovered or not?
Thanks for any help!
Lost most likely. Copy the files to the PC. There are more tools available for Windows than Android.
From now on copy/paste, verify size and readability, then delete the source files.
Check Event Viewer during the transfer time to see if errors were reported in Windows. Maybe a bad cable, port, driver issue, etc.
In the future regularly and redundantly backup critical data on at least 2 hdds that are physically and electronically isolated from each other and the PC. I keep all critical data, music, vids, docs, backups go on the SD card and use it as a data drive. Only apps, the DCIM (backed up to the SD card regularly) and download folder go on internal. Then I backup the SD card.
There can only be one folder on Android with the name dcim. So when you backup the images in the internal memory dcim folder to the SD card rename it something like Master Pics to avoid issues.
Think it through and develop a system; everything you need to do a full reload/restore should be on the SD card. Few people utilize the SD card as it should be... it shouldn't be just a random collection of files. It adds an extra layer of protection for your data. Always use a quality V30 rated card like the Sandisk Extreme.
Any chance the photos were backed up to some service online? Google Photos is free and generally present on most Android phones, Samsung has their cloud, and some carriers do as well...
In the future, like @blackhawk said, backups are FAR more important than recovery. ANYTHING important to you should be backed up ("3-2-1" is a good policy to practice). For photos, Google Photos is great because it's free (to a limit, of course) and very easy to use. I've been recommending that to everyone, even iPhone users, because recovery is harder than ever these days - SSDs and flash can fail catastrophically and without warning much more easily than the old spinny drives which usually give some warning.
Sorry there isn't much better news. You may be able to find some un-delete software and try it. There may be paid services as well, but for the most part, it's probably lost...
If you do find something that works, do let us know... always good to find out new options! Good luck.
schwinn8 said:
Any chance the photos were backed up to some service online? Google Photos is free and generally present on most Android phones, Samsung has their cloud, and some carriers do as well...
In the future, like @blackhawk said, backups are FAR more important than recovery. ANYTHING important to you should be backed up ("3-2-1" is a good policy to practice). For photos, Google Photos is great because it's free (to a limit, of course) and very easy to use. I've been recommending that to everyone, even iPhone users, because recovery is harder than ever these days - SSDs and flash can fail catastrophically and without warning much more easily than the old spinny drives which usually give some warning.
Sorry there isn't much better news. You may be able to find some un-delete software and try it. There may be paid services as well, but for the most part, it's probably lost...
If you do find something that works, do let us know... always good to find out new options! Good luck.
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Click to collapse
Sadly, no. Didn't use a backup service online. Thanks for the advice though--I used to be pretty good about backing things up routinely, but have gotten lax. Sadly this is the consequence.
DakenSG said:
Sadly, no. Didn't use a backup service online. Thanks for the advice though--I used to be pretty good about backing things up routinely, but have gotten lax. Sadly this is the consequence.
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Click to collapse
That's a typically error when using MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) and you shouldn't use it for transferring files whenever it's possible. MTP was developed to offer a wide range compatibility for the most storage devices but it's very buggy and very slow.
Next time you should use the internal file explorer to copy data to your SD. This is the best practice.