I'm facing a strange situation on my Nexus 4, with Android version 4.2.2. I've being using it for the past 2 months without any issues whatsoever (other than a "regular" battery performance), but since last week I started seeing some duplicated albums with images on the Gallery. So, some images and videos appear twice, both with the same album name, but on a different "physical" folder, one on the folder /storage/emulated/0/ and the other on /storage/emulated/legacy/. I'm absolutely positive that this issue started only last week and the "duplicated" images existed before this issue ever appeared. I haven't installed any custom ROMs, I'm not rooted and haven't installed any apps in the las week (other than Google Translate, but I find it hard to believe that this is related). If this is a duplicated, please feel free to close it and point me to that discussion. If you need any more details, I'll update my question.
1 Answer
That's not duplicates. If you are the "device owner", /storage/emulated/0/ is your storage area (where your files etc. reside). /storage/emulated/legacy/ is a symbolic link, always pointing to the logged-in user's storage. That is, if you are the device owner, and you are logged in, both locations are identical. If some apps show the contained files as "dupes", they obviously have problems interpreting symlinks.
While for the gallery, this sounds pretty strange (if we are talking about the stock gallery, and not a 3rd party app): the very same Android developers who designed the multi-user capabilities should have been aware of that. Still, this is not the first time I heard about it. I cannot find the other issue currently, but a solution is as follows:
Go to Settings→Apps→Manage Apps, and scroll to the Gallery app. Open its entry, tap "Clear Cache" and "Delete Data". Tap the back key, and repeat the same for the "Media Storage" app.
Don't be afraid about losing data: the Media Scanner will re-collect them at its next run. You can trigger the scan by either...
- powering off/on the device (bah!)
- going to Settings→Storage and safely remove the SDCard, then mount it again (OK for one-time use :)
- using a helper app like e.g. SDrescan or Rescan SD Card! (if you need it more often)
Once the Media Scanner is finished, all your media should re-appear in the Gallery app. Hopefully without the "dupes" :)
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I understand the they are not actually duplicated, I had seen it like that on some file explorer apps; but, in fact, I am now seeing them twice on the stock gallery app, wich had never happened before and is quite annoying.– LamakApr 8, 2013 at 19:28
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I've read before that the stock gallery sometimes did things like that (just remember that now). I cannot find the issue currently, but it was exactly the same thing with the storage being linked. If I remember correctly, the solution was to delete chache & data from the corresponding apps (gallery, media-stuff -- don't remember the exact places), as the media-scanner then refreshes them fine.– Izzy ♦Apr 8, 2013 at 19:45
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I couldn't find a solution for this exact issue either, wich is why I posted a question here :-). I'll try deleting cache now and will let you know if this fixed the issue. Many thanks– LamakApr 8, 2013 at 19:50
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You're welcome! If cache alone doesn't help, try deleting data as well (I guess you'll have to). As said, the media scanner should re-collect it again at its next scan (unmount/remount SDCard to trigger it). Unless, of course, you delete data from other (unrelated) apps ;)– Izzy ♦Apr 8, 2013 at 19:55
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1@Boris_yo "constantly reoccuring" after having applied above "fix"? And with exactly the described locations? Then the only explanation I could offer is a buggy media scanner. No idea how to fix that (apart from a software-update, if available, which might fix it).– Izzy ♦Sep 1, 2014 at 15:30