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I recently lost the contents of a micro-SD card and hadn't backed up the contents recently enough. Luckily, I noticed that the pictures I was missing happen to be in /storage/emulated/0/DCIM/.thumbnails on my Android 5.1 device. The sad thing is I cannot get to those files to do anything with them on my device. The only way I even knew that they were there is because ASTRO File Manager brought them up when I searched for pictures. I would love to be able to put these in a safe place and hoped to be able to do so via my computer. Does anyone know of a way to get my computer (Windows 7) to recognize this file? (Naturally, I told my computer to view hidden files, so that's not the issue.) All I can see is /Internal storage and /SD card (not /storage). If you have a workaround, please let me know too. If I can move (or better yet copy) these photos to another place on my phone and then move them, that would be absolutely wonderful.
1Try copying them elsewhere using ES File Explorer. In addition, as phyrfox said, it is likely these are just thumbnails (based on the name), rather than the full pictures. I'd recommend using a file recovery program on your SD card before writing anything else to it. – NateR – 2015-08-03T03:23:41.503
1Ah, I'm sorry to hear that. Honestly, I don't have any ideas for how to extract the thumbnails from it, if they aren't visible in there. What app were you able to see the pictures in? Also, I'd recommend trying to ask the question over on the Android Stackexchange (android.stackexchange.com) as well... There might be more people knowledgeable about your situation there. EDIT: Just tried it out on my own phone, and the pictures are showing up in the .thumbnails file just fine. Do you have "Show Hidden Files" set to "On" in the menu of ES File Explorer? – NateR – 2015-08-03T04:25:35.107
I actually got it. Let this serve as another lesson to BACKUP YOUR FILES! Totally automatically backing mine up now! Thank goodness for thumbnails! – Padawan – 2015-08-03T04:38:26.753
Very glad to hear! What ended up doing it for you? – NateR – 2015-08-03T04:41:29.947
Combination of using 3 apps and my computer to move stuff around. Only got the thumbnails, but I'm fine with that :). – Padawan – 2015-08-04T04:16:01.143
I am facing the same issue. I can see the files on the phone but its under the emulated/0 directory which is mounted/hidden from windows interface on the laptop. File search is not an option too. I need to backup my files before I hit reset. Would appreciate any answers that worked well for others. Cheers! – Swanidhi – 2016-04-06T17:10:07.797
Try going to /Internal Storage/ in ES File Explorer. This may only work on pictures, but you can moven them to another location. I used a couple more apps to make them regular pictures and then back them up, but that's what I did... Hope it helps! – Padawan – 2016-04-09T16:03:48.350