[SOLVED] Samsung Galaxy S8+, cannot delete thumbnails that don't exist but I can still see

[paulb104]

My S8+ is running android 9. I have no pictures on the phone. In fact, I've deleted the entire DCIM folder. I've optimized storage, I've deleted the Gallery data and cache, I've rebooted. I've shut the phone down and booted into android recovery and wiped the cache partition. All that and I still have a folder titled Thumbnails that holds 1,012 photos. I am not synced to the samsung cloud because when I do it starts to download all the pictures I've deleted.

When I attempt to delete pictures within the folder I get the error message "Couldn't move image(s) to the Trash. Try again."

From within Gallery I can rename the Thumbnails folder, which I did to Zzz. When I went into My Files, which has it showing hidden files, and did a search for Zzz, nothing comes up. When I do a search for thumb, nothing comes up. When I do a search for jpg, nothing comes up.

Just for the sake of doing so I created a DCIM folder, then created a subfolder called .thumbnails. No effect.

How do I get rid of the folder with the thumbnails that is showing in my Gallery?

 

[Sagar_20]

Connect your phone to a computer and try to delete it manually.

If no success, resetting/formatting would be your best bet.

Just make sure you have all your data backed up to your computer or an external drive.

 

[paulb104]

Connect your phone to a computer and try to delete it manually.

Plugging it into my Windows 10 Pro computer shows that there's no DCIM folder. Taking a photo immediately creates a DCIM folder with the picture in it, but nothing I can do, either on the phone or via computer, can delete the folder of thumbnails that the phone thinks is there.

 

[paulb104]

I called Samsung customer service. We went through a number of basic steps, then the rep had an idea. He had me add external storage (either sd card or OTG, didn't matter) and moved the thumbnails to the storage, which I did. Then, when I deleted THOSE pictures, the thumbnails on the phone deleted with them. They were like ghosts - waiting to complete their tasks. They needed to be attached to something before they could be deleted.

I just wonder where in the operating system they were hiding because there was no thumbnails folder and the cache partition had been repeatedly wiped...