Photo's not saving

I’ve been having issues with taking photos quite often lately. I have a fairphone 4 and every so often when I take a picture either it just doesn’t save (this happens too often for me to think its just a user error) or it shows as a white file (in Google Photos) and in the file app as just an error image. Anyone else having this issue and perhaps have a fix?

With the stock “Kamera” app I have a similar issue. In the directory DCIM there is a 0 byte file with error indication. In DCIM there is a sub-directory called “Kamera” and the photo can be found properly in that directory. However, if I want to look at the photo from within this app, it tries to show the file from DCIM.

Using OpenCamera, the photos are only found in that sub-directory and looking at the taken photo it correctly shows the photo from within that sub-directory.

I have no idea how I got there.

This issue did already happen on Android 13.

How is your file structure for storing the images?

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I’m having the exact same problem, with same fie paths (except folder is named ‘Camera’, not ‘Kamera’) I’m guessing the app creates the empty file as it is trying to find it.

Looks like previous photos were saved in the ‘Camera’ folder. Seems like easy fix, wrong default file path somewhere.

This happened after the A15 update for me.

This is being discussed in the main FP4 Android 15 announcement.

Just don’t lock the phone or leave the photo app right after taking the picture. Give it a few seconds to save the image before doing something else. Of course, this is a workaround, not a solution.

I did all of those things. Issue isn’t in this case that it’s not saving the file. It saves it just fine. The app is just looking for the photos in the wrong folder.

It’s an extremely minor issue, but a bit annoying. Everything else seems to work just fine after the update. I issued a bug report on this.

I checked the subfolder “Camera” within the DCIM folder but it also contained the 0 byte error files so I’m not sure if we’re on the same page? Or am I looking in the wrong place. Because so far everytime I’ve had the error with a photo I haven’t been able to find it anywhere else in a subfolder

There could be several different issues here:

  • Wrong paths. Check that the camera apps have the right path to store pictures. If you have a SD card, remember there is one DCIM folder in the main storage, and another in the media card. What I have done to avoid confusion is that inside “/DCIM” I have created a folder “Camera” and a folder “OpenCamera”, and pointed each app to their respective folders. Now if I take a picture with the FP4 camera app (for instance) the result will be in “/DCIM/Camera”.

  • If it isn’t writing files, it can be because the new, very severe A15 battery management kills it before it has finished processing the picture and writing it to disk. In this case this post might help you give it the time to finish writing. (“Might” because I can’t check, I’m still on A13)

If your problems started with the A15 upgrade, chances are the culprit is the latter, and giving the camera app more time should solve it.:man_shrugging: