Camera storage to SD card

[br0die 2]

I'm trying to get the Snapdragon Camera to save images to the card, but it tells me it can't access the sd card.

I've tried this fix https://forum.xda-developers.com/lineage/help/lineageos-camera-storage-location-t3597639

But it didn't work. Anyone have this problem?

[EskeRahn 5,471]

1 hour ago, br0die said:

I'm trying to get the Snapdragon Camera to save images to the card, but it tells me it can't access the sd card.

I've tried this fix https://forum.xda-developers.com/lineage/help/lineageos-camera-storage-location-t3597639

But it didn't work. Anyone have this problem?

The link you are posting is on LineageOS, have you flashed that? If so I will change the title to reflect that 🙂

[br0die 2]

No, I'm just running the stock Pro1 rom, it was just the only thing I found to try and fix it.

[EskeRahn 5,471]

Just tried to insert an SD-card (formatted in another phone or pc years ago), booted the phone, started the Snapdragin camera, setting, storage, selected SD, back, took, an image, and it worked well.

(Changed back to phone, pulled the SD card and checked on a computer and the image was where)

Try a small card, to see if that makes any difference (the one I used was an old 1GB I pulled from a Galaxy Wave(!) a few days ago for playing with SFOS)

[SchattengestaIt 559]

Try to go to apps -> camera app -> storage

Stop the app, delete data and cache.

 

Then go one step back and to permissions:

Ther (re)enable the storage permission.

I don't know if the fault is in the app itself, but maybe this helps.

[david 929]

13 minutes ago, SchattengestaIt said:

 

Quote

 

 

Ignore the above.  Website is having issues.

 

Can you see the SD card in phone settings->storage?

Edited February 17, 2020 by david

[EskeRahn 5,471]

1 hour ago, SchattengestaIt said:

Try to go to apps -> camera app -> storage

(That is what the XDA link he tried suggests)

[SchattengestaIt 559]

6 hours ago, EskeRahn said:

(That is what the XDA link he tried suggests)

I only see the data reset while I am proposing to reset data and enable the storage manually permission in case the popup doesn't work.

@david No, but sometimes resetting a permission (storage) can still solve the problem. In Android you often get simple solutions while in operating systems like Windows you can use every provided tool and nothing will happen.

 

@br0die If that doesn't work (which is likely), you could reformat your sd card. Sometimes you need to use a different file format to allow all the apps to read the card. If your sd card is currently formatted with exFAT for example, try FAT32. exFAT is better than FAT32 and has no filesize limit, but FAT32 is sometimes more compatible with specific apps and older programs/systems.

Don't forget to backup your data. If the card is already full of data, you can try another card formatted in FAT32 (and try the same card with exFAT to compare) and check if it works.

 

If that doesn't work either, you could try and go through the threads mentioned there:  https://forums.androidcentral.com/android-6-0-marshmallow/955130-my-apps-cant-see-access-my-sd-card.html

But I haven't read through them.

[EskeRahn 5,471]

27 minutes ago, SchattengestaIt said:

@br0die If that doesn't work (which is likely), you could reformat your sd card. Sometimes you need to use a different file format to allow all the apps to read the card. If your sd card is currently formatted with exFAT for example, try FAT32. exFAT is better than FAT32 and has no filesize limit, but FAT32 is sometimes more compatible with specific apps and older programs/systems.

As far as other posts goes, the Pro1 does not seem to support exFat, so go for Fat32.

24 minutes ago, SchattengestaIt said:

If that doesn't work either, you could try and go through the threads mentioned there:  https://forums.androidcentral.com/android-6-0-marshmallow/955130-my-apps-cant-see-access-my-sd-card.html

But I haven't read through them.

There is a thread on SD here as well, so maybe a more relevant place to start. But I see nowhere mentioned that ha can not see the card at all. So Let us keep the camera stuff apart

[david 929]

27 minutes ago, SchattengestaIt said:

 

@david No, but sometimes resetting a permission (storage) can still solve the problem. In Android you often get simple solutions while in operating systems like Windows you can use every provided tool and nothing will happen.

 

Sorry, I was replying to him, not you.  The website was just acting weird, and it wouldn't let me delete that quote block! LOL

So @br0die, do you see the SD card in phone settings->storage?  If not, then the apps won't be able to access it.  If you don't see it there, you can try rebooting the phone and you can try taking it out and putting it back in.  You can also try it in a PC.  

As mentioned, exFAT will not work in the Pro1.  It will need to be FAT32, if you want to use it as external storage in the Pro1.  If you want to use it as combined with internal storage, then the Pro1 will set it up in a different way and you won't be able to read it in a PC if you take it out of the phone.  

[SchattengestaIt 559]

8 hours ago, david said:

  If you want to use it as combined with internal storage, then the Pro1 will set it up in a different way and you won't be able to read it in a PC if you take it out of the phone.  

It's the other way around. If you set it up as internal storage, you won't be able to take it out while in use. Otherwise the system and apps can crash and you can get a lot of problems. I don't recommend this setting anyways since a faulty card can cause a lot of trouble.

I wonder though how the SD card will be recognized from apps. Will it be shown separately or will it be part of internal storage with no way of selecting it directly?

[david 929]

3 minutes ago, SchattengestaIt said:

It's the other way around. If you set it up as internal storage, you won't be able to take it out while in use. Otherwise the system and apps can crash and you can get a lot of problems. I don't recommend this setting anyways since a faulty card can cause a lot of trouble.

That is what I said in the part you quoted.  I was speaking of setting it up to be used with internal storage in one big pool.  It is called adoptable storage.
 

3 minutes ago, SchattengestaIt said:

I wonder though how the SD card will be recognized from apps. Will it be shown separately or will it be part of internal storage with no way of selecting it directly?

You don't have control anymore.  It will look just like internal storage, I believe.  You can tell the OS to move apps between true internal and adopted external, but only if the app has been set up to allow it.  

Now, if you are rooted, there might be some low level ways for rooted apps to look at it differently.

It will run things slower than true internal storage too.  In a phone that has plenty of internal storage for apps, I am not sure what the advantage is of using an SD card as adoptable storage, unless you want it to be encrypted.

There is another option, in case someone really wants to do it.  You can set aside a part of the SD card as adoptable and part of it as external/portable.  

[br0die 2]

Sorry bit late back to this thread. 

The card is fat32, I have another few posts in another thread about the problems I ran into trying to get it recognised by the phone.

Short of it is, It's formatted (by the phone) and recognised, I'm reading files off it. It's 64GB. I could try a smaller card to see if that makes a difference.

[david 929]

8 hours ago, br0die said:

Sorry bit late back to this thread. 

The card is fat32, I have another few posts in another thread about the problems I ran into trying to get it recognised by the phone.

Short of it is, It's formatted (by the phone) and recognised, I'm reading files off it. It's 64GB. I could try a smaller card to see if that makes a difference.

Can you send a screenshot of the error?

[SchattengestaIt 559]

12 hours ago, david said:

I am not sure what the advantage is of using an SD card as adoptable storage, unless you want it to be encrypted.

The feature evolved when apps got much bigger but old phones had very little storage. Many cheaper phones back in the days had 8-16GB of storage but apps (combined with data) grew over 500MB very fast. With an 32-64GB card, that problem was solved.

Also, external storage is often faster than the old internal storages. So there was another reason to move apps to SD card and later change the card to internal storage.

 

@br0diePlease try any other card to see if the same errors appear. I think there is a connection to the camera problem.

[david 929]

8 minutes ago, SchattengestaIt said:

The feature evolved when apps got much bigger but old phones had very little storage. Many cheaper phones back in the days had 8-16GB of storage but apps (combined with data) grew over 500MB very fast. With an 32-64GB card, that problem was solved.

Also, external storage is often faster than the old internal storages. So there was another reason to move apps to SD card and later change the card to internal storage.

You cut off the first part of my sentence in what you quoted "In a phone that has plenty of internal storage for apps,".  I was saying that I don't know if it serves much purpose for the Pro1 and other modern phones, because they *do* have a lot of internal storage, unlike older phones did.

[SchattengestaIt 559]

1 hour ago, david said:

You cut off the first part of my sentence in what you quoted "In a phone that has plenty of internal storage for apps,".  I was saying that I don't know if it serves much purpose for the Pro1 and other modern phones, because they *do* have a lot of internal storage, unlike older phones did.

You are right. I was reading in a hurry and I overread that phrase. Sorry.

[david 929]

1 hour ago, SchattengestaIt said:

Also, external storage is often faster than the old internal storages. So there was another reason to move apps to SD card and later change the card to internal storage.

This is a very good point.  I had this very situation with my Relay 4G phone.  Although I did it because I was constantly running out of space on the internal storage, when I used link2sd to move a lot of my apps over to the SD card, I also got a performance boost when launching apps.  The reason was that the external SD card was faster than the internal storage (when tested with apps in the phone).  I thought for sure that the interface to the card or the card itself would end up being slower, but that wasn't the case.  I don't remember exactly, but I think it was about the same speed for writing, but faster for reading, which worked out perfect for launching the apps.

With the Pro1, the internal storage, in theory, can read over 8 times faster (850 MB/s) than the limit of the external storage (104 MB/s).  And, with how things are currently working on the Pro1, the external storage is only reading at about 1/5 of that limit (about 20 MB/s).  I have a fairly fast card that *should* be able to read close to 80 MB/s, but it is only reading at 20 MB/s.  

What all this means is that anything stored on the SD card, in the Pro1, with adoptable storage, will be accessed far slower than that same thing being accessed from internal storage.  I really have no idea how much that will impact things from a usability standpoint.  Both internal and external may be fast enough that it isn't perceivable for the small amounts of data that get loaded when an app is launched.

As an aside, it is difficult to test performance, due to memory caching.  The tools will write data and then read the data back. When they read it back, they are getting it out of the cached version in memory, so the read speeds are incorrect.  (although in actual use, that does happen, which is one nice bonus of having 6 GB of RAM in the Pro1)  By using a tool that does the read test after you reboot the phone, I was able to get over 200 MB/s for both reading and writing.  In fact, the writing was a little faster than reading.  It was closer to 250 MB/s.  That means the internal storage isn't operating as fast as it theoretically could.  However, we do have encryption enabled, so that might affect the performance somewhat.  

I've also read that adoptable storage can suffer from double encryption. There is a way to avoid that, but it might be present by default on the Pro1.  That will slow down access to the external storage even more.  That isn't an issue when using the external storage as portable storage, as there is no encryption being done by android.