com.android.gallery3d | What is gallery3d | How to fix

Hello there! Today we are up with some discussion about com.android.gallery3d or com.sec.android.gallery3d. We will come to know about what it is, why it exists. We are also going to look at steps to fix some of the related errors. To start with, we all know how important our mobile phone to us is. In the early days, we had costly cameras and stuffs. To get a good picture, we had to wait for the camera film to end and the photo to get printed. Digital camera brought about great transformation after its invention in 1975. Now, new generation smartphones have engulfed all the features of a digital camera. When you are out creating memories, smartphones help you capture the moment. It allows you to instantly view the captured images or video through a simple tool called “Gallery.”

Gallery helps you manage and organize all your images, videos and GIFs in a single place. It also has built-in image editor where you can edit your image in no time. Cropping, mirroring, rotating, applying filters and text on the image are some of the editing features that the Gallery offers. You pretty much mess around in gallery a lot. Sharing image or video via applications like WhatsApp requires you to open gallery. You do a lot of such tasks without knowing the background story (this is what data abstraction is, by the way). Today we are going to unveil the background that actually works.

What is com.android.gallery3d

  1. It does not require to be said, com.android.gallery3d is a package that ships with the Android OS. This is the general convention of naming packages.
  2. com.android.gallery3d is a system application related to your default Gallery app that comes with your phone. If you delete the data or force stop it, it will get started again the next time you open Gallery.
  3. Generally, the Android OS has numerous cache directories and files. They are designed to store the data when you work with an application. This data comes into play when you open the application again, the next time. This time it gets loaded more quickly, as some data was stored back in the cache.
  4. Now the problem with this is that, it may cause some storage issues. Most of your user data is stored in your device. In fact, the operating System is also stored as a backup within other system files that are hidden. This results in doubling up of the files in your device.
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Images are stored within com.sec.android.gallery3d

  • When you connect your mobile to laptop in File Transfer mode, you may have come across the DCIM folder. The DCIM folder stores all your images and videos taken with mobile camera. In other words, when an image is captured, it is automatically saved in the DCIM folder of your device.
  • However, your mobile phone has the Gallery app to view the images. Basically, the mobile phone uses the Gallery app to browse through the DCIM folder.
  • The Gallery is in-built in almost all Android phones. Hence, it is a system application. When you open Gallery, you don’t see the entire big image at once. What gets displayed is a small thumbnail of the image. You can take thumbnail as a small cover page of the image.
  • These small thumbnails serve for some purpose. It allows the user to view the content of the DCIM folder without actually opening each image separately. So you just open Gallery, and scroll and browse to get the image you’re looking for.
  • The thumbnails are retained by your Android OS. They are stored in com.sec.android.gallery3d in the data directory of your phone. This is because if you decide to do the same thing again (which you of course do), the thumbnails being displayed need not be re-created. This saves a lot of resources and memory of your device. Also, the process is convenient because your phone is working less, and hence the images now load faster.

Importance of com.sec.android.gallery3d – Recovering accidentally deleted images and Forensics

  1. As we were talking about, it helps to load the images faster when you open Gallery. The data is stored inside com.sec.android.gallery3d which is used when you open Gallery the next time.
  2. When you delete the original image from the gallery, it is not removed from this folder. A copy of the image still remains inside com.sec.android.gallery3d.
  3. This actually helps in Image Recovery. When you accidentally delete an image from your gallery, don’t worry, you can still recover it. As mentioned, the image is still stored in com.android.gallery3d in the form of small thumbnails. There are a lot of applications available that claims they can recover your deleted images.
  4. Go grab one of them. They basically read the file com.android.gallery3d and try to convert the thumbnail back into your image of full size. Note that if you know programming, you can also write a piece of code by yourself to read the file.
  5. Also, the user cannot access this folder. Hence, it comes to great use when we talk about mobile phone forensic investigation.
  6. While the user believes that he has deleted the image (that was sort of some proof, let’s say), a copy of it still remains in the folder. The user is completely unaware about that. Forensic experts can dig through the system and find out the copy of the image from com.sec.android.gallery3d.
  7. The copy of the images from the file com.sec.android.gallery3d can be deleted by the user as well. This is achieved using “File Manager”. However, all copies are restored when you open Gallery the next time.
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When you use Secure Mail to attach an image, there is a common error that you might encounter. This problem occurs specially if the Inbound Document Exchange is set to Restricted. The only open options to attach the photo are either the last photo taken, or the camera opens up for you to take a new photo. As a result, you cannot attach images directly from the Gallery. You can use few configurations to solve this problem.

Solving the problem:

  1. Put “Block Gallery” to “Off”.
  2. The Gallery package ID is com.sec.android.gallery3d or com.android.gallery3d (depends on your device).
  3. Set the InboundDocumentExchangeWhitelist visible:
  4. Download the Secure Mail APK from the internet. Then, wrap the APK file with the MDX toolkit.
  5. Locate the MDX file in your laptop. Change the extension of the file from .mdx to .zip.
  6. Then, open the .zip file. Within it, locate the policy_metadata.xml file.
  7. Change InboundDocumentExchangeWhitelist from <PolicyHidden> true </PolicyHidden> to <PolicyHidden> false </PolicyHidden>. This is just the XML syntax, so don’t worry much. Then, save the policy_metadata.xml file.
  8. Select all the files that are present inside the folder and compress the files. Click on the compressed file. Click on Get Info and change its suffix back to .mdx again.
  9. Upload the customized.mdx file to the XenMobile console. Now, you need to paste the gallery package name to the “Inbound document exchange whitelist” policy. This wasn’t previously visible, but now you have made it visible.
  10. Save and deploy secure mail. Now, you can attach your images directly from the gallery.

Problems with com.android.gallery3d

Every feature has one problem or the other. The main problem with this package is that, it stores a copy of all the images in the gallery. This consumes a lot of your device storage, especially when you have thousands of images. Also, you cannot get rid of this. Once you delete the copies from the com.android.gallery3d folder, they are regenerated on opening gallery again.

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“Unfortunately, Gallery has stopped” is a really annoying error. Not only you use gallery for viewing images, but it’s also used while attaching images to other apps. When gallery stops, it turns your device numb. Here are some methods which you can try to fix the above error.

  • Firstly, try to reboot your device. This may fix the problem.
  • Clear cache. You can clear cache by following Settings > Storage > Cache Memory in your android device. Also, clearing the contents of com.android.gallery3d file will make your gallery start afresh. So, the error might get fixed.
  • Un-mount your SD card. Sometimes when your phone is unable to read SD card, it leads to such annoying problems. Reinserting the SD card back into its slot may fix the error.
  • Go to Settings > App Settings and reset app preferences. Then, restart your device and check if the error persists.

How to fix com.android.gallery3d

Use the following three steps to fix the error com.android.gallery3d has stopped or disabled by the system:

Step1: You need to go Setting-> Apps-> Show system App-> Search for com.android.gallery3d

com.android.gallery3d

Step2: Once the system app gallery3d opened, click on the storage. You will get the option of clear cache and clear data. tap on both simultaneously.

 clear cache and data of com.android.gallery3d

Step3: Reopen your gallery3d App, if again you see some problem of stop, then click on force stop. It will fix the error com.android.gallery3d has stopped.

fix the error com.android.gallery3d has stopped

Conclusion

To conclude, we can say that com.android.gallery3d is an important integral part of your phone. In short, it stores copies of images in small thumbnails. This can be used to recover accidentally deleted images and also for forensics. However, there are some problems with this as well. Unfortunate stopping of gallery and unwanted filling of device storage is some of them.