\mnt\sdcard vs \mnt\extsdcard

[dietzgw]

Just got my new Galaxy. Have been runing Android 2.3 on an HTC Incredible, but ICS on the Galaxy seems to be different.

With no SD card in the Galaxy, the Astro file manager shows a folder called \mnt\sdcard. Seems odd, with no SD card in the phone. I can find my photos, etc., in this location so it must be the phone's internal memory even though it has "sdcard" in the path name? Is this how it is supposed to be? An \mnt\sdcard folder even with no SD card in the phone?

I then pulled the SD card from the HTC Incredible and put it into the Galaxy. I now have a folder called \mnt\extsdcard that does actually appear to be my SD card.

It is also interesting that when I opened the camera app to snap some photos, it said that it detected an SD card and asked if I wanted to make that my default photo storage. I said "yes", thinking that this would put new photos in with the existing photos on the SD card (from the Incredible), but although it put them on \mnt\extsdcard\dcim, the new photos are in a "camera" folder and the existing (from the Incredible) are in a "100media" folder. When I view the photos from within the camera app, I only see the new ones that I just took. But if I view them from within the Gallery app, I can see them all.

So, it looks like the file structure changed significantly on ICS? And that there is an \mnt\sdcard folder even if you don't have an SD card? Looks like I've got some work to do to get things moved to the correct folders so that I can see everything in one place, moving them from \mnt\sdcard to \mnt\extsdcard.

[Steveanderson13]

No, my GB Bionic is same.

[PaisanNYC]

Even with regular digital cameras, every camera maker uses a different file folder within DCIM for photos. So its not surprising that HTC and Samsung use two different folder names inside of the DCIM folder for photos taken with the two different phones. (Not really an ICS issue on this subject).

Also, on my old Gingerbread phone, it was the same way. Internal memory was \sdcard, and the actual card itself showed up as \extsdcard

[intlbizman]

different *camera* apps will store the photos in a different folder. even on the same phone if you install a DIFFERENT camera app, you will find it may store the photos in a different folder... heck even the SAME app if you update to a newer version, could potentially store in a different folder... even if it stored in the same folder, it could save them as a different file name convention.

i share your gripes about the sdcard vs extsdcard though, it adds additional layer of complexity that isn't needed.

need an app that will "merge" the contents of both sdcard and extsdcard so i can free up the extsdcard until it's absolutely needed.

[windstrings]

I too came from the DINC to the GS3.
I found some apps actually require moving the whole directory they once had in the old location "mnt/sdcard" to the new location "mnt/extsdcard". Yet some apps can browse to see both.

One serious gripe I had was that I finally gave up cooresponding with the "myback app" guys as they seemed clueless to the new issue. I couldn't restore my apps as the app didn't allow paths higher than the sdcard.
I finally had to literally move the whole reware directory to extsdcard to get mybackup to find it....I could not restore my Home either for some reason... anyway, this isn't a thread about myback, but I thought I would mention it.

Another strange issue I found was that if you view your sd memory in the Samsung galaxy S3 by going to "settings, Storage.... I saw my 32gig total in device "I have the 32gig version" with 24.3 available.. while I realize some of the space is for formatting, thats still a difference of 8 gig. It shows 5.91gb of miscellaneous files.....stuff in device memory even though I never moved it there?.... seems its really reading the sd card because if I view "sd CARD" memory there are 29.97gb showing total after formatting "I have a 32gb card", with 25.65 gb available, when I know for a fact there is much more on my sd card.

Now to confuse matters worse, you will see inconsistencies between those numbers vs. what you see when you go to..... "hold the bottom center button down about 3 seconds you will see the task manager, hit that button, now at the top scroll over to "storage".... there you will see numbers which appear to more accurately reflect whats really going on...... Mine shows 2.07gig system storage and 4.32gb SD card.

I was up till 2:00 am trying to figure it all out.... I've finally simply moved what I must to mnt/sdcard and left everything possible in mnt/extsdcard.

I"m guessing this parallels the reasoning why every phone seems to store pictures in a different spot.. "so they don't all get mixed up?".... but there is lots of confusion when you have a directory called /sdcard thats really not on the sdcard???? Especially when the phone actually uses that directory for some apps.

[Martinj1966]

But how do you tell the OS that the "extSdCard" location is the default sdCard location, not the "sdCard" location in internal memory?

[nhizzat]

/mnt/sdcard/, /storage/sdcard/, and /sdcard/ are symlinks to /data/media/. I can't recall which symlinks were present in ICS and which were added with JB.

In JB, the external sdcard will be listed as /storage/sdcard1/ if there is an external sdcard present.