Orange San Diego Phone had software update, How do I download photos?

[Tyranna]

Just a bit of troubleshooting about my recently purchased Orange San Diego phone.

 

I had to have a software update carried out on it (Only 2 months after buying it lol) at the EE shop and I was wanting to restore factory settings including network availability, as the network had become unavailable for some reason, so the EE shop advised that I first of all transfer all my personal photos from the phone's memory to my laptop in case they are deleted or corrupted by the restoration to Factory settings.

 

So I plugged the phone into my laptop using the interface cable and a box pops up on screen with only 3 options: 'synchronise phone with Windows Media Player', 'open with Napster' or 'do nothing'.

There are none of the previous list of options such as the simple 'Open Folder' which I have successfully used just before the 'software update' to transfer photos from my phone to the same computer (which is a Advent laptop running Windows XP).

So I click 'Cancel' on the pop up box and then go to 'My Computer' and open the 'Android Phone' icon which has now appeared in the dialog box, an this takes me to several folders, including 'playlists', 'pictures', TWO 'DCIM' folders, 'Lost.dir', 'Android' and several more. However, on clicking ALL, except the 'Pictures' folder, they appear to be totally empty. I checked 'size' under 'properties' with a right click and all of these have '0 bytes' as the size. In case it might be that I have to copy a folder onto my machine to open it properly, i have copied one or more of these folders onto the desktop, but STILL they contain nothing.

The only exception is the 'Pictures' folder, which contains ONLY copies of ALL the photos on my laptop (several thousand in about 20 folders) within it, and I CANNOT find the 300 or so photos on my phone ANYWHERE in this folder.

FYI, I HAVE also checked that the 300 or so photos on my phone ARE still there, and indeed they are, in a folder on the phone now called '100ANDRO' which is accessible from the 'Social Gallery' icon on the main Menu.

 

Is there anyone who knows precisely HOW I can download these photos to my laptop with the minimum of trouble? Do I have to access a particular transfer or 'copy/paste' function on the phone-screen itself, and HOW do I do this?? I am at my wits end, any help would be MUCH appreciated!

[AlexAtkin]

It sounds like you upgraded to a newer version of Android, they switched from accessing the phone via Mass Storage to using a protocol similar to cameras, which is why the options changed.

 

However the fact you cannot find your photos is still weird as for all intents and purposes it works the same as before. On my Galaxy Note II they are in:

Phone, DCIM, Camera or,

Card, DCIM, Camera,

 

Depending on if I saved to the phone memory or SD card.

 

I would recommend you install Ghost Commander on your phone and try to figure out exactly where they are located from that. At least then you know exactly where they SHOULD be when using the PC and if for some odd reason its somewhere the PC isn't showing, you can move them. If you install the SMB plugin you can even move them directly to the PC if you have file sharing enabled on it.

[megalithic]

It may be OTT but what i'd do is run something like Panda recovery and get them off there that way. i'm cautious now after losing several thousand pics to an hard drive that worked intermittently, of course by the time i got round to doing a recovery it'd given up the ghost completely.

[AlexAtkin]

Its worth noting that if its using the new protocol then recovery wont work as Windows doesn't access the phone directly anymore.

[megalithic]

Recuva ?

As an aside i purchased Bad copy Pro in an attempt to save my pics so i'm not familiar with freeware versions like i used to be.

[AlexAtkin]

But if they are showing in the gallery and can be viewed, then that would imply there is nothing wrong with them. So I think they are just saved somewhere odd for some reason and need to be moved to the right place to get at them from the PC, which is why I suggested Ghost Commander.

[megalithic]

But if they are showing in the gallery and can be viewed, then that would imply there is nothing wrong with them. So I think they are just saved somewhere odd for some reason and need to be moved to the right place to get at them from the PC, which is why I suggested Ghost Commander.

 

I agree but as it's an android device i'm lost, still on Symbian here.

[Tyranna]

Thanks for the replies; I'll look at Ghost Commander, as I have STILL, despite MORE help from the EE shop, been unable to sort this out!

[Greengeek]

Install dropbox on your phone and PC.

Sign up for a free account, and enable photo upload.

 

As soon as your phone sees your wifi connection, it will push all the photos to Dropbox, and then to your PC.

[AlexAtkin]

Not sure why I didn't think of that, seeing as myself I have my phone setup to upload my photos to Google+/Drive automatically.