Gallery photos deleted after "album merge"

[TMallard]

I just had all the photos from the past month -- including travel to Asia -- disappear off my phone after a "album merge" of "Camera" and most of the photos in the album "screenshots" after "album merge

[nullandvoid]

Check Google photos. Your photos shoud have ben backing up to Google.
Albums don't usually merge unless there are two albums with the same name.

[TMallard]

I disabled that back-up after my Google photos got so full that it wanted to charge me. It was a nuisance to delete photos off both my phone and Google photos.

But what the heck -- Samsung "combined" two "camera" albums and two "screenshot albums" and I lost scads of photos.

Teresa

[nullandvoid]

Well,  you don't have to pay for additional storage unless you want to,  You could clean out the Google backup by either deleting photos you no longer want or moving them onto a flash drive.  The Google backup cloud allowance includes not only photos, but everything in your Google Drive and anything in Gmail (so make sure to empty the trash and sent folders,  cull any no longer needed emails from personal folders and download and dis-attach attachments from any emails you may be saving).  If you are an Amazon Prime member, Amazon has unlimited photo storage as part of your annual membership.  It's always a good idea to have an offline backup of your photos in case of disaster.  That is the reason flash drives exist - to preserve important stuff in case of device failure (and portability).  That you lost some photos is unfortunate, but I think the fault lies more with you because you had two albums with the same name, and you did not utilize any other form of backup.  Albums automatically merge when they have the same name, but you shouldn't lose any photos because of it, all photos should be contained in the newly merged album.  

FWIW, you don't  have to delete photos from both Google photos and your phone.  If you delete photos from your phone first, you will have to delete them from Google Photos.  However, if you delete them from Google Photos, they are automatically deleted from your phone.  Google is BACKUP, not SYNC.  It's there so if you accidentally delete a photo from your gallery that you want back, or you are just freeing up space, you will still have the photo in Google (unless it's full or you stop backing up).  Once you delete the photo from Google, it's gone from all the linked drives, as Google assumes if you are deleting it, you no longer want it or have it backed up elsewhere.

[TMallard]

But I didn't have two albums with the same name.  "Camera" is the depository for all photos that aren't in albums.  I'm not sure where else on my Samsung there was anything else called "camera."  LIkewise with "screenshots," which were also deleted.

And to me, merge means that all the photos will be put together -- not that a bunch of non-duplicates would be deleted.  And that didn't happen here.  I lost an entire month's photos from "camera" taken in Fiji and the Solomon Islands.  From "screenshots" I lost all but a dozen or so.  I'm wondering if a scheduled update was the problem.

[nullandvoid]

That is what is supposed to happen when albums merge.  But, if you had no duplicate albums, there shouldn't have been a merge in the first place.  I don't think an update would have caused that to happen, especially since the gallery app was not updated with any new features in OneUI8. But, even a casual glance at the forums here will show you that some updates do not behave as they should. Have you checked the DCIM folder in the file manager to see if the pictures are still on your phone, but somehow not being recognized by the gallery?

Which phone do you have?  Is it an A with an SD card?  If there was an album on the SD card with the same name, that could have been the cause of the merge.  If you don't have an SD card, I have no other explanation for a rogue album merge when there were no albums to merge.

[TMallard]

Thanks for your suggestions.  I am going to follow your suggestion that I reactivate the Google Photos back-up.  Meanwhile, the phone is a Galaxy S24.  No SD card.  I'm missing photos in my "Camera" file 12/1 - 12/25.  There may be others, but I've not figured out what could be missing.  I'm also missing .  I'm also missing all but 18 screenshots -- and I used that frequently.  12/25 is the date of the last software update -- so I have to think that's significant.  When I opened Gallery after that,  messages came up that the "Camera" albums and "Screensaver" albums.  See the screenshot at the bottom of the page  I took just now of the Gallery Screenshot folder, showing the "merged" message.

I looked in the "trash" in the Gallery.  282 images that I'd manually deleted in idle moments over the past several weeks, but none were taken in the missing weeks.

I used  "My Files" to sort all images on the phone by date.   Again, nada.  Also looked in DCIM -- only the folder's I've created were there.

I am curious because when "My Files" also showed OneDrive storage.  No idea why.  Oddly a search of that for "camera" came up with folder labeled Samsung Gallery >DCIM>Camera.  I have no idea why there it was there but I deleted it by going on-line to my cloud storage on OneDrive.   My missing photos weren't there -- the photos were old.

[nullandvoid]

The screen shot you posted looks like they only merged the alum "screenshots".  When they use the term, "two albums with the same name have been merged", they mean there was one album named screenshots in another location and one album named screenshots in the primary location. They would have merged into one album in the primary storage location. The Camera album looks not to have been merged.  If the camera album had been merged, you would have a second notification of two albums being merged. Although, if you had more than 372 images in the camera album, they are missing for some reason. I'm going to assume you did the obvious here and moved to the "pictures" tab and the missing photos do not show there.  

if you are logged into your OneDrive, it will show in the file manager.  I believe that unless you turn it off, the Gallery syncs with OneDrive (I don't remember whether it's on or off by default - I have it off because I deliberately turned it off).  If sync is on, photos in the gallery sync with your OneDrive (like Google, up to the available space).  But, it's a sync, not a backup.  Photos deleted from either gallery or OneDrive  will delete in both locations.  There is a separate setting to back up photos to OneDrive.  With Sync , Samsung creates a folder on your OneDrive called "Samsung Gallery".  All your synced photos go there, and if they are somehow missing from your gallery, they will also be gone from there. 

With backup, I believe it creates a folder called "pictures" and keeps your album structure while backing up the albums you select. (it's been a many years since that folder was created on my drive, I don't remember if I created it myself or not).  The Samsung gallery  (for sync) is created within this folder.  Because it's backup, these pictures don't get deleted if they are deleted from your phone the way the synced ones do.

I see Microsoft has been messing with OneDrive's structure and the way it stores photos again (at least on their web interface), so it's possible that if you have sync on and MS made this change during the suspect period, the fault lies with Microsoft.  I don't know if this is true, it's just a guess. I didn't even know that they made this change, as I don't usually enter OneDrive from the web interface, only from the app.  

The fact that your photos are just gone without a trace and didn't land in the trash is just baffling to me, for whatever reason they disappeared.  Even when you manually delete files, they go straight to trash so that they can be recovered within 30 days.  They don't get directly, permanently deleted

I'm sorry that you lost irreplaceable photos (I know what that's like), but going forward, even if you utilize the Google or OneDrive backup, you should still take a flash drive and copy your photos to a flash drive during any period of time where you took new photos, and never perform an update before backing up your personal data.  Samsung provides unlimited 30 day temporary cloud storage for just this purpose. You can even utilize this temporary space if you are traveling to backup your travel photos until you get to a place where you can back them up someplace else.