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Saturday, January 01, 2011

Clear Gallery Thumbnails on Android

As I often transfer the photos from my (Android) phone to the PC, I delete them from the phone. However, the thumbnails remain in the Gallery application. They happen to be black, indicating there is no photo, but they are still there, which is a bit annoying. I tried some tips from forums to use Astro to clear thumbnail cache but that did not help.
To remove all the thumbnail data - go to Android directory on the phone (on Android 2.3.7 Cyanogen it is on SD Card in /mnt/sdcard/Android). Delete "com.cooliris.media" directory.
After this, you will notice the media manager rescanning the media and, when you open the Gallery, only the existing photos will have thumbnairs. Voila!

7 comments:

Alen's Australia said...

On Android 2.3.4 this is in
/sdcard/Android

Alen's Australia said...

On Android 2.3.4 this is in
/sdcard/Android

Emiel said...

The way it worked for me was just disable my picasa sync, go to menu > settings > applications > manage applications > all > gallery > clear data and force close.

When you restart the gallery, the thumbnails from images that do not exist are gone

DigitalEngineer said...

Thanks for starting this feed. I use the Android app FolderSync to sync my pictures to DropBox which confuses the default Gallery App. So I replaced the default Gallery App with QuickPic which provides better performance anyway. If you are stuck on the default Gallery App, try Gallery Excluder which has an "Update Media gallery" function that works for the default gallery app.

Anonymous said...

This problem is likely to happen when the SD card is removed out of the Android device and then updated with any picture, music or video files.
Here's another solution:
•Select "Media Storage" located at Settings/Apps/All/
•Select "Clear data"
•Select "OK"
This will force all thumbnails to be refreshed; it can take a while depending on the amount of files.
This problem may be avoided if you transfer files with the SD card inside your android device using the regular USB cable

Anonymous said...

Im responding to anonymous post about going to media storage under settings/apps/all/. This is the only method that worked for me. However, BIG WARNING!! Your photos and other files will be deleted! Make sure you backup your phone to your pc or something. Then you can copy files back over to your phone.

Anonymous said...

Update to my previous post about files being deleted. I'm on android 4. Your results my differ depending on your os version.