4.2 jelly bean - I'm seeing duplicated images and videos on Gallery

I'm facing a strange situation on my Nexus 4, with Android version 4.2.2. I've being using it for the past 2 months without any issues whatsoever (other than a "regular" battery performance), but since last week I started seeing some duplicated albums with images on the Gallery. So, some images and videos appear twice, both with the same album name, but on a different "physical" folder, one on the folder /storage/emulated/0/ and the other on /storage/emulated/legacy/. I'm absolutely positive that this issue started only last week and the "duplicated" images existed before this issue ever appeared. I haven't installed any custom ROMs, I'm not rooted and haven't installed any apps in the las week (other than Google Translate, but I find it hard to believe that this is related). If this is a duplicated, please feel free to close it and point me to that discussion. If you need any more details, I'll update my question.

Answer

That's not duplicates. If you are the "device owner", /storage/emulated/0/ is your storage area (where your files etc. reside). /storage/emulated/legacy/ is a symbolic link, always pointing to the logged-in user's storage. That is, if you are the device owner, and you are logged in, both locations are identical. If some apps show the contained files as "dupes", they obviously have problems interpreting symlinks.

While for the gallery, this sounds pretty strange (if we are talking about the stock gallery, and not a 3^rd party app): the very same Android developers who designed the multi-user capabilities should have been aware of that. Still, this is not the first time I heard about it. I cannot find the other issue currently, but a solution is as follows:

Go to Settings→Apps→Manage Apps, and scroll to the Gallery app. Open its entry, tap "Clear Cache" and "Delete Data". Tap the back key, and repeat the same for the "Media Storage" app.

Don't be afraid about losing data: the Media Scanner will re-collect them at its next run. You can trigger the scan by either...

• powering off/on the device (bah!)


• going to Settings→Storage and safely remove the SDCard, then mount it again (OK for one-time use :)


• using a helper app like e.g. SDrescan or Rescan SD Card! (if you need it more often)

Once the Media Scanner is finished, all your media should re-appear in the Gallery app. Hopefully without the "dupes" :)