Android: Preventing Gallery thumbnails creation

I’m really having an hard time in this period (exams, duh) but considering the fact I’m having more views that I ever expected, I’m gonna drop something useful here.

Don’t worry, long posts with many informatics technical stuff are already in background. I’m thinking about a server-related tutorial series, I suppose people will enjoy.

Anyways, back to the topic.

What do you mean in the title?

Let’s be honest, Android OS can’t be perfect. We already know this. But there’s lot of customization avaible, which makes it my favourite mobile OS (for now… But I think/hope this won’t change). Anyways, I can detect with SD Maid about 1.8 GB of Stock Gallery thumbnails. And that’s a big bunch of crap. (PRO TIP: visit darken’s website or take a look to his G+)

Why this happens?

Actually, Android just tries to speed-up the Gallery (in my case, Google+ Photos app) by creating a local preview that can be loaded really fast by gallery apps… However, this creates the junk I told before.

Any fixes?

Yeah, the title would be different if it wasn’t like this. However, this requires a mobile with a custom recovery (like ClockWorkMod or TWRP) and some Android/Linux OS knowledge. (At least, try to understand what follows next.)

Let’s go!

The idea is to make impossible to create new thumbnails; so, why not deleting the thumbnails and make the folder to be impossible to access? Exactly, this will make the trick. Now, reboot your phone in recovery mode and open your shell (in TWRP there’s one that can be runned in recovery, else connect your phone to your PC and use an adb shell… check that you’re using root with whoami)

cd /sdcard # Should exist as fallback... anyways, getting in your main memory folder
cd DCIM # Entering photos folder, where thumbnails are
rm -f .thumbnails/* # Removing all thumbnails
chmod 000 .thumbnails # Making the thumbnail folder not accessible anymore

Done! Now the thumbnails in the Gallery app will be generated on the fly… and you will have some free memory now. That’s all for now, folks! Wait for the tutorial series.