sd card - Gallery is displaying three, sometimes even four copies of the same file - why?

I have a non-rooted Android phone running 4.0.4 (ICS). The phone has 3GB of internal storage and I have inserted a 16GB SD card. The SD card contains a number of audio and video files.

When I opened the stock Gallery app, the directories on the SD card were displayed as expected. However, there was one small problem: multiple copies of each video were being displayed.

Wondering if something had happened to the SD card, I unmounted it and inserted it into the card reader in my computer. After mounting the card, I opened a terminal and ran:

find * | grep .mp4

But the results were exactly what I expected - there was only a single copy of each video on the card. None of the files were duplicated.

Next, I tried clearing the cache of the Gallery app (Settings->Apps->Gallery->Clear Data). After relaunching the app, I discovered even more copies of each video.

One important detail to note: only the videos on the SD card appear duplicated. None of the videos on internal storage suffer from this problem.

Answer

Though it's not the identical situation, the solution which worked out for I'm seeing duplicated images and videos on Gallery might apply here as well:

1. Go to Settings→Apps→Manage Apps


2. Select the "All Apps" tab


3. Find the Gallery app, open its entry, tap "clear cache"


4. Do the same for the Media Storage app


5. Have the Media Scanner running again. This can be triggered by either
   
   
   
   • a reboot of the device (ugh!)
   
   
   • unmounting/mounting the external SDCard if any (hm...)
   
   
   
   • attach the device to your PC via USB, optionally copy some file to it, detach it again (ok...)
   
   
   • for repeated use, take a look at apps like e.g. Rescan Media, Scan Media, or SDrescan (yeah!)
   
   
   
   


6. Check if the duplicates are gone. If not, repeat everything, but this time additionally select to "delete data"