Photos disappearing from Lumia 620!

[One Brain Cell]

I have a Lumia 620 running on the Three network carrier with a 32Gb micro SD card installed. All photo's and videos taken are set to store on the SD card rather than the phone's internal storage.

I've noticed recently that photo's are disappearing from my phone. These are pictures I've taken with the phone which then reside in the 'Camera Roll' section. There seems to be no reason why some are disappearing and others remain, but it's really annoying and it's making me lose trust in using the phone to take pictures. I've already lost some important one's and this is not me being silly and accidentally erasing them.

Also, the phone appears to duplicate my stored photo's seemingly whenever it wants... presumably when it's bored. Why does it do this, and why is there no obvious sequence to it? For example, if it wants to make multiple copies of photo's by itself then why does this activity not occur at the same time on the same date? Why are some photos removed by the system and others left alone?

I've updated to Amber in the last two days, I have no idea if this will solve the issue. The missing photo's went missing about a week ago, but right now I have no faith in taking photo's or video with this phone, which is one of the main reasons I bought a Lumia.

Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[nfbsk]

Apparently the Amber update update fixes the duplication issue, but the caveat is that if you already have duplication, then you will need to hard reset. And reformat the SD card. Basically starting over again.

 

[One Brain Cell]

Well the duplication I can almost live with compared to the phone actively deleting my photos without permission!

Thanks for your answer. Do you mind if I ask what is the difference between a hard and soft reset, and how do you do them?

Annoyingly I can’t start all over again with my phone as I found it has high Mac OS requirements that I cannot meet (it requires minimum OSX.7 whereas my computer can only go as high as OSX.5). Very annoying when in the Windows world you can use a machine running XP!

 

[nfbsk]

A hard reset can be done by going to settings-about-reset your phone. Everything not backed up will be lost, your phone will return to factory settings. Are you sure your photos are deleted? Did you check the contents of your microsd card on a computer?

 

[One Brain Cell]

Thanks nfbsk,

I haven't checked yet re: SD card on a computer. Are you thinking that the Windows indexing is not working for some of the data, so in fact it's all still there on the card but the phone can't see them? That sounds rather bonkers for a phone that's only been in operation for the last four months. It's not like I'm using it outside of it's expected pattern of use!

 

[anon(8247123)]

My wife's 620 has recently started doing both of these things. The duplication is annoying (interestingly the JPG files only appear once on the SD card) but losing the photos is really bad as she lost some that she took on holiday before we'd had chance to download them to the computer when we got back.

I have a Lumia 920 and have not had either issue on that.

 

[One Brain Cell]

Hi nfbsk,

I?m going to go for the hard reset option. I recently reformatted my MicroSD card (using the Lumia 620 to reformat it). I hoped this would make the SD card work more smoothly, and whilst it has, it seems clear now that the phone has duplicated all the thumbnails of everything it sees on the card (thanks ntice_521 for helping me understand this issue). As a result, my ?other? storage has ballooned to 3.84Gb and now I only have 637Mb free on the phone?s internal memory.

If I reset my hard reset my phone, will it keep all my settings and history regarding texts and Whatsapp? These are the only things I?m concerned about.

- My text message backup says its switched on.
- My Whatsapp says it was last backed up today.

So that means that Microsoft and Whatsapp have all my messages backed up to their servers, and when I re-install Whatsapp for instance, all my details & messages will return? (sorry if this all sounds very simple, I?ve never done backups and whatnot).

I think I read somewhere that Microsoft has a record of all things I currently have installed on my phone, so for instance if I lost my current phone, I could buy another WP phone and have everything exactly as it was just by logging in?