Regain Gigabytes of Space on Your Android Device

When you're struggling along on the 8GB or 16GB of storage space that your Android device allows you, an opportunity to reclaim up to 2 GB of additional space can be welcome. Where does this free space come from, though?

To find out, you should first head to the Storage section in Settings on your device. It should tell you how much space the image folder takes up. You're likely to find that it hogs way more space than your photo collection alone would need. The problem lies in your device's collection of thumbnail files.

What about the Thumbnail files?

For every image file that you store on your device, the Android OS creates a thumbnail to make sure that your thumbnail gallery loads quickly. Third-party apps like WhatsApp and Viber can create their own thumbnails when they scan for image files, too. Depending on the app, the file name is usually something that takes this form: . thumbdata3--23774 .

If space is tight on your Android device, you can reclaim space by deleting the contents of these thumbnail folders. Doing so wouldn't affect the actual image files. You can save on a lot of wasted space, though.

Deleting the thumbnails

To delete these files, try following these simple steps:

. Open File Manager on your device. If your File Manager is unable to display hidden files, you need to find a new app that does.

. Navigate to the DCIM folder on your microSD card. You'll see a hidden folder in it labeled name.thumbnails . Here, you'll find the space-hogging thumbnail files that you need to consider deleting.

Before you actually delete the thumbnail files on your device, you need to make sure that Android doesn't recreate the data the moment it sees that it's missing.

To begin, you need to copy down the name of each file. Once you have all the names of the files that you plan to delete, you can go ahead and delete the files themselves. Then, you need to fill the folder with placeholders, one for each deleted file.

How do you create placeholders?

For each file that you delete you need to create a dummy file. You can open a text editor follow these steps:

. Create an empty file and give it the name of a file deleted earlier. Make sure the name is exactly the same as the name of the deleted file and that it starts with a period (which signifies that it is a hidden file).

. Next, you should navigate to the .thumbnails folder in the DCIM directory of your microSD card and paste each newly created file.

This way Android is unable to create a file with the same name to replace the thumbnail that you've deleted. Your space is safe.

DCIM is the default folder in which image files are held. If your device stores images in a different folder, you need to apply these steps to that folder.