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I have a stock Motorola Droid 3 on Verizon. The device is not currently rooted. I am not sure if the Gallery app on my phone is specific to the Motoblur UI.

I was testing the .nomedia trick/hack, by putting a zero-length file named .nomedia in my Downloads directory. I also cleared cache and deleted app data of the stock/standard Gallery app. it didn't appear to work, so I decided to say "screw it" and deleted the .nomedia file.

Sadly this kind of ruined things. I reopened the gallery app started showing duplicates of most (but not all) of the images. If I clicked on one, it'd only load the thumbnail with just "loading..." ontop, like it was trying to generate the full sized image. If I long-pressed and clicked "photo info" gallery would crash. If I hit delete, it would delete the entry from the gallery view with no problem. The other one of the duplicates appeared to be the real image so it loaded no problem.

Now, I could've manually deleted all the extra erroneous thumbnails, but that would be too time consuming as I had over 600-some correct images. So I decided to try a shortcut. I went to /dcim/.thumbnails and cleared the directory and I also went to /android/data/com.moto.blur.mediaprovider and cleared the thumbnails stored in that directory. When I went back to the gallery the situation got even worse. Now there's like 3 copies of the images.

My prediction is that it's generating thumbnails, then generating thumbnails of those thumbnails. I tried clear the .thumbnails directory, which had over 2000 images in there. As soon as I restarted the gallery app, it'd fill right back up again. I tried the same process and rebooting, but again, starting the gallery app causes it loop with the thumbnail generation.

I tried putting a zero-length file .nomedia into the .thumbnails directory but that didn't seem to be doing anything.

Is there something that I'm missing? I really don't want to do a factory reset as I don't have any easy way to back things up.

Also, I do not have an SD card at the moment. All of this is being put on the local storage for the phone.

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Please attempt the following:

  1. Delete the entire .thumbnails folder
  2. Delete the /sdcard/Android/data/com.android.gallery3d folder
  3. Go to Settings->Apps->All and select the Gallery app. Select clear data.
  4. Go to Settings->Apps->All and select the Media Storage app. Select clear data.
  5. Reboot your device.

This will completely erase all data from the gallery app, and if you open it before you reboot you should notice that you have no thumbnails. They will be generated on boot.

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  • I think I found a side effect, but it may be completely unrelated. And I have no way of confirming if I is linked or not.. but since I made this fix, I have discovered my on-device Google Music playlist has disappeared. No big deal, I will just re create it. It was probably stored in the Media Storage psuedo-app.
    – WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot
    Commented Dec 10, 2012 at 5:07

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