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I am running Android 12 on a Galaxy A12 phone. Recently, out of the blue, image files that I transfer to my phone from my computer have been having the following problem:

At first, right after I transfer them, they are OK. I can view them in Gallery. When I'm done, I'll close that app. Later, I'll need to view them again, so I'll go back into gallery, but they will be corrupted. Gallery will just tell me "Unsupported Media" or some such nonsense and refuse to display them. I can transfer them over from the computer again, replacing the corrupted files, and they will work again for my first session of viewing them... and then they won't.

This never used to be a problem.

I am saving them to my external SD card. I have not tried saving them on the phone's internal storage, but that would not be feasible. My internal storage is tight, and I need to conserve it. The images happen to be PNG format images. That is what I use most commonly. I avoid JPEG due to it being a lossy format. But I CAN verify that this problem happens to GIFs as well.

I have tried using Gimp on my computer to open and resave the original images in the hopes that there was just something odd about the files, and Gimp would save them "properly". That actually worked for a few of them for a while, so I thought that that was the problem, but then even that stopped fixing them. Even my gimp-saved images started doing this.

I have tried installing and using several other gallery apps in the hopes that the default one was just stupid, but no luck. Nothing can view them once they spontaneously corrupt like this. I don't even know what causes them to go corrupt. Sometimes they will work for a few viewing sessions, quitting and restarting the Gallery and coming back to view them later a few times. Sometimes they will go bad after the first session. I can never predict when they will die.

Even more confusing, sometimes the thumbnail will become corrupt along with the image, causing the Gallery to display a blank icon both when listing images and viewing individual ones, and sometimes only the full image will get corrupted, so that I can see the thumbnail in lists, but not the full-screen image when I try to view it. It is completely unpredictable which images will do which.

I am at a complete loss here. Has anyone ever encountered this and/or does anyone know what is happening?

EDIT: I should also mention that any images saved before this started happening don't get corrupted. This only happens to images newly transferred after the problem started.

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  • Welcome to Android Enthusiasts. I don't use an external SD card, so all of this is basically a guess, but could it be that the SD card might be encrypted? How did you set up the SD card; as portable storage or as internal/adopted storage?
    – Andrew T. ♦
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 10:17
  • What happens if you copy the corrupt image files back to the computer and compare them to their original source files? Are they still identical?
    – Robert
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 10:44
  • Samsung, external SD, photos? Ouch. My wife swears on Samsung. That combination ALWAYS turned out as you described: the Sammy phone breaking the SD card – on EACH of those devices (3 Galaxies meanwhile). Please check: does the same problem occur if you copy the photos to the internal card? I bet not. Which most likely means your Sammy ate your external card, as (to my experience) all Sammies do.
    – Izzy
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 10:49
  • Just tried transferring back to the computer, and yeah. The file from the phone is wrecked. Both Gimp and Windows Photo Viewer are unable to open it, saying that the file is corrupt. Next I'll try saving to the phone's internal storage...
    – FireWingLead
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 18:54
  • As for how I set the card up, I have absolutely no idea. Portable storage? Internal adopted storage? What's the difference? All I did was shove it into the appropriate slot on the side of the phone for that purpose before starting the phone up.
    – FireWingLead
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 18:58

1 Answer 1

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As @Izzy advised, I tried saving my pictures to the internal storage instead of the SD card. It seems he was right. The answer to my problem is simply that Samsung Phones have a major defect. In this case, eating/destroying my SD card.

At every turn, through one incident after another, I have been finding that experimentally switching from Motorola to Samsung when last I needed a new phone was the worst phone decision I ever made, and this incident has been the worst yet.

Never buy Samsung. Period. That is the answer/solution. And if you already have, your only solution is to discard it for something that actually works, instead of being actually LESS than not working--actually malicious.

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  • I have used Samsung phones for 10+ years and I have used an SD card (the same one in fact) for at least 6 years. And I replace my phone almost every 18 months. I have had no problems. Perhaps you should be looking at the quality of your SD card !
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 13:52
  • No. Pretty sure it's the phone. See Izzy's comments on the original question. According to him, every one of his wife's Sammys have always broken their cards like this. I think there's a much higher chance that it was the phone, not the card.
    – FireWingLead
    Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 16:06
  • Furthermore, my Motorolla phones never had this problem with their cards. So I'm pretty sure the problem is Samsung. I switched on a whim to try something new, not because there was anything wrong with Moto. That was a bad idea. I liked Motorolla, and I should go back as soon as I can.
    – FireWingLead
    Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 16:07
  • Thats as much proof as my comment, which makes it null and void. My wife also uses Samsung, and similarly, no SD card has ever been destroyed, ever. ITs more likely to be the quality of the sdcard or some app you may have on the phone. And I have 300+ apps, and it still works. !!! As I change my phone, I take it out and plug into the new one. I have swapped phones 4 times this year.
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Jun 12, 2023 at 3:18
  • @Rohit Gupta My Sammy recently got destroyed since posting this question, and I had to buy a new phone. I switched back to Moto. It's cheaper, and better. It is already showing up my Sammy to have been relatively expensive garbage at every turn. I'll have to wait and see if it handles data transfer from computer to the card any better, but if it does, then consider the "More proof than your comment" acquired. I suspect it will, since the Motos I had previously to the Sammy did.
    – FireWingLead
    Commented Aug 4, 2023 at 21:05

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