Hello community!
I’m the happy owner of a FP2 since month April this year.
I have 2 issue
Cannot access all internal data I put inside the phone : no app or place to explore it (photos, videos, voice records, documents and so on). I found a solution for pictures and videos > downloading a ‘gallery’ app from Playstore. But still no solutions for the documents I download (for instance: pdfs, words etc.)
How to do that?
all the medias (pic and videos) are automatically saved and synchronized on my google photos app, which was already installed on the phone when bought. Of course having a permanent backup of pics is nice, but it means I need to consume data to connect to the app every time I want to go on it, and my google photos storage is getting smaller and smaller.
THank you VERY much for your help!
Cheers
Amance from France
Afaik Gallery only handles datatypes/file suffixes it knows e.g. pictures (jpg, png, gif…).
Iirc there is no default app installed to display .pdf, .doc, .docx, .xls… files.
The stock file browser is “Amaze” which should get you anywhere the standard (non-root) user is allowed to browse to on any available storage media.
It´s not so fancy imho (hense I´m using Totalcommander), but you should be able to browse your files to see where they are located.
Pictures normally on internal memory in DCIM/camera. Screenshots in Pictures/Screenshots.
For PDF reading you could download MuPDF or any other available PDF app from the play store. Different Doc types (M$ & Open/Libreoffice) can be read with LibreOffice Viewer. But there are also M$ apps for such filetypes available in the play store.
This depends on how you have setup your device and put your account synchronizing settings (I assume using the Google Drive option is the default when you´ve registered an account). This may be changed if you prefer to keep data also offline on your handset. Actually I am not quite sure anymore were exactly to change this and my first search in this forum did not give any useful results.
My first advise therefore is to go through the “Google settings” in your “All apps” list. I expect this setting to be found there somewhere (btw. I think the Google structure is horribly messy). Otherwise your registered Google account ought to keep it (somewhere).
Hello ! Thank you very much for the very complete answer. It helped me a lot. I downloaded an exploring data app and I can access my files.
Now today I have a new problem. I tried to download my pictures from FP2 to computer. They appear in internal storage / DCIM / .thumbnails, I cannot find all my pictures (they are mixed with some dowloaded from other apps) and the most important problem is that the quality is so bad. In the phone, it says one picture is around 3 to 7 Mo, and on my PC they are 30 ko.
Do you have any idea of why this happen and how can I fix it?
Actually there isn’t anything broken. As you write:
That’s all you have there, nevertheless this folder is generic for images which has been displayed but must not necessarily keep 100% thumbnail copies of all original images. I think it is mainly used by the OS and maybe some 3rd party apps as it is a system folder hence the leading dot in its filename.
All you can expect here as usual in such a “.thumbnail” folder are finger-prints (thumbnails->small images) of their originals.
So your originals must be somewhere else with, as you correctly expect, larger file size.
As I wrote in my last reply there is a “DCIM” folder. Which again seems generic on many other application where I could find it (other phones/cameras).
In this folder there should be at least one more beside .thumbnail called “camera”. This should be the default folder when using the standard Android camera app. Afaik it won’t let you change the save location to anywhere else.
In case you use a different app e.g. open camera then there should be another folder called “opencamera” keeping your original images. This app though lets you change the save location btw.
So take a look into the other folders in DCIM, your images should be there unless you have set the picture save location to a different place (Google drive??).
As I have Google photos disabled I don’t know how this app interacts with taken photos. Maybe they are all shortly synchronized as soon as there is a network available keeping your storage free (this setting could be optional). So you would again have to download them all from your online storage. But I am only guessing.
Hello! Thank you for your quick and kind reply.
In DCIM i have only another folder (thumbnails) and then a selection of 1/10 of my pictures that were taken with my camera. I tried everything (resetting the settings of camera, of storage and drive), I have no solution. Apart from creating a separated folder and pasing the photos in it. Which is… not feasible on a long term basis.
Not very happy with this. I changed from apple to use my phone as an USB key for everything and especially pictures and this is not possible. Very disapointed.
Do you know if I can get in touch with FP team?
Thanks!
One more thing that you could try is clearing and letting rebuild the “media storage”. It is some sort of index that keeps browsing through the files on your phone to build an index of all that contents. It seems that sometimes this media storage stops getting renewed, so newer files will not show up in it anymore.
Go to Settings > Apps > (touch the 3 point in the up-right corner) Show System processes (or something like that, I translate from french) > Media Storage > Storage* > Clear DATA. […] NOTE: It is important to let your fp rebuild his ‘library’ so wait at least 10min and check if you can load properly your pics on the phone (like usual)
Source:
If your photos still do not show when you connect to a computer, then feel free to contact Fairphone Support:
So this is the wrong location although the DCIM folder is the default save location for your pictures unless it was changed. The folder name actually should be .thumbnails which is a system folder (leading dot).
It only keeps as the name says small thumbnail images with low quality of your original images which must then be located somewhere else…
As these thumbnails are not the original images but small ones with poor quality there is no use to keep them. You need your originals. Btw. as this is a system folder your access (copy/move/rename) may be restricted.
How about your sd card, does it keep the camera folder in DCIM ? Afaik there is only one choice by default, this path on your internal or external storage depending on if the save path setting is unaltered or customized by using a 3rd party camera app.
I am not aware of any other save path for taken pictures, sorry if I could not help any further.
Hi!
Found how to do what you recommend, but very worried about doing it, because :
If I clear all my datas, how can I be sure not to ‘loose’ everything?
