Viewing Android files from PC - Closed Thank you!

Technology
1

Before I throw this (expletive deleted) phone into the bin and buy another little camera, I thought that you kindly people perhaps wouldn’t mind offering some suggestions.

I have connected my phone to my Windows laptop with a USB lead.
File explorer appears on the laptop saying that the phone is empty.
At the same time a notification appears on my mobile phone sayng that it is connected for charging only and to tap the notification to use the USB for transferring files.
Every tech page I’ve found on this subject online says the same thing.

However many times I tap or swipe the notificqtion before it disappears, absolutely nothing happens.

Any ideas, people?

2

Get the free version of Airdroid and use that.

Which phone BTW - you might need to tweak an option to make it appear as a USB storage device.

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3

Samsung Galaxy A04S. It appears in my file explorer but empty. I can’t find anything on either the phone or the PC to let me see files.

4

Can you see the photos using the built in “Google Photos” app?

Give Airdroid a go - it allows you to transfer the files using wi-fi

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5

I can see nothing from my PC apart from the device itself.

Thanks for the Airdroid suggestion - I shall look into that, but I don’t understand why a straightforward physical connection doesn’t work…

6

I can see the photos fine on my phone from various directions but there is no capability to save them to anything other than the Cloud. They are currently sitting on an SD card in the phone. I think last time I tried to do this I had to actually remove the SD card and read it in the laptop. Obviouly I am reluctant to do that :smiley:

7

Either the laptop doesn’t put out enough power or the wire is faulty and phones default to just charging if not enough power. You should have a notification that you can click to change it or search for USB in settings. Should have a USB preferences and change it to file transfer

8

my phone says use usb for no data transfer - file transfer - transferphotos (PTP)

Open laptop file transfer then click on phone and find your photos.

9

The wire is fine, the phone is now fully charged. As I said before, the notification appears but clicking on it has no effect whatsoever, so I cant change the USB preferences.

EDIT: Searching settings for USB does not come up with USB preferences.

10

I’ve done that but although the phone shows on the laptop, it says there are no files.

11

I’d just close the phone down and pull the card - cable transfer can be a bit flakey sometimes IME.

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12

Ah, right - the USB storage might only access the phone’s built in storage, the SD card, if it shows up, is probably a different path.

But you can move the SD card to the PC with a suitable adapter (as long as you did not encrypt it).

13

Yes I can, thank you, and that works fine. It’s just that it does seem to be a bit of a drastic step when I have a nice reliable USB lead :roll_eyes:

Thank you too @Ancient_Mariner - I had a horrible feeling I’d have to resort to that!

Do other people just keep their photos on their phones or stick them in the cloud? I like to keep my stuff within my own control :smiley:

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14

TBH I tend to treat the phone as a kind of digital notepad, rather than holding precious memories. Some of my pictures are ‘in the cloud’, others on hard drives in various places.

15

Cloud, automatically (it’s an iPhone), like @Ancient_Mariner . Otherwise if you lose your phone, or you have a mechanical failure, you’ve lost everything.

If I were someone famous, I would probably do otherwise.

16

I’m probably a bit excessive but I follow the 3-2-1 principle… that is 3 copies, on 2 different types of media, 1 of which is off-site.

That means, in practice, I have the originals on my phone, which are backed up to my file server and also copied to Google Drive.

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17

Well, it reliably fails to let you have your photos, at any rate :slight_smile:

18

Some USB cable that you buy for charging, including some supplied with phones, are only wired to supply power and don’t work with data. I think if it has the proper USB cable icon on it then itshould do data.

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19

Google Photos can find your pictures and then back them up. You can then run Google Photos on your Windows PC and download them. I download the backed up photos on my Windows PC from my phone once a year and archive them.

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20

I transferred my photos from my telephone to a memory stick via my laptop and I’ll copy them onto an external hard drive for good measure once I’ve got one :slightly_smiling_face:

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