Not all files are visible over MTP

I have LG L5 (e610 model) device with Cyanogenmod 10. When I connect the phone to a computer with Linux (I have mtpfs installed), I can see both internal storage and the SD card. However when I navigate inside them, I can't see some of the files.

For example, if I open file manager app on the phone, I can see several files in the Internal storage/Notifications directory, however the directory on the computer only shows one of those files.

If I switch USB connection type to PTP (camera) - as OS X doesn't support MTP natively - Image Capture sees the phone as a camera, however it can only see about a third of all the images present on the phone.

I don't have a Windows machine to try, but I suspect the results would be similar.

I tried upgrading Cyanogenmod to the latest nightly, clearing and reinstalling it - same results. Any idea as to what is going on? How can I make all files appear on the host computer?

Answer

This is apparently a known bug in Android which is not even acknowledged by Google since Oct 2012, bug #2 — depending on the method of creating files on the Android device, these files may remain invisible when accessing the device using MTP, until the device is rebooted.

Known workarounds include:

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  Use USB storage mode instead of MTP, if it is supported by the phone. This is apparently not an option for LG Optimus L5 (e610), because this phone has unified internal storage (file storage is in /data/media on the same ext4 filesystem as /data), which cannot be exported as an USB storage device.

  
  


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  Clear data of the “Media Storage” app, then use the SDrescan app to rebuild the media database (discussed here).

  
  


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  Share files over the network using third-party apps such as AirDroid or one of Samba server apps (in the latter case you will need to have root to make the server reachable from most clients, including Windows).