Camera can't take pictures or videos after manually copying over folders to new phone

General
1

To save a lot of time with the backup and restore process, I manually copied over the Pictures and Videos folders from my previous phone to an (ext4-formatted + encrypted) SD card to the new phone. Everything shows up in the Gallery, but the Camera app doesn’t allow me to take any pictures or videos, as in it doesn’t do anything when I tap the shutter button. It does work when I change the storage location to the SD card, but saving on the internal memory isn’t possible.

I have a feeling it’s some kind of permissions issue, but no idea what to fix exactly.

2

Open the terminal, do ls -la Pictures Videos and post the contents here. (Unless there’s folder names you do not want to show in public.)

(The terminal app will appear by enabling “Developer mode” in Settings/Developer Tools.)

6 Likes
3

No worries, I just cleaned up both folders a bit to make it more legible:

[defaultuser@JollaPhone2026 ~]$ ls -la Pictures Videos
Pictures:
total 508
drwxrwx---   10 defaultu privileg      4096 Aug  4 10:20 .
drwxr-x---   19 defaultu defaultu      4096 Aug  4 09:14 ..
drwxrwxr-x    2 defaultu defaultu      4096 Aug  3 21:30 .thumbnails
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu defaultu     12288 Jul  6  2023 AdvancedCam
drwxrwxrwx    2 defaultu defaultu      4096 Jul  6  2023 Android
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu privileg    462848 Aug  2 15:21 Camera
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu defaultu      4096 May 10  2021 Default
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu defaultu     12288 Aug  4 10:15 Screenshots
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu defaultu      4096 Jul 21  2025 Whisperfish
drwxrwxrwx   14 defaultu defaultu      4096 Aug  4 10:20 screenshots

Videos:
total 28
drwxrwx---    7 defaultu privileg      4096 Aug  4 10:19 .
drwxr-x---   19 defaultu defaultu      4096 Aug  4 09:14 ..
drwxr-xr-x    3 defaultu privileg      4096 Jul 20 15:58 Camera
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu defaultu      4096 Aug  3 23:43 Default
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu defaultu      4096 Aug 19  2015 Jolla
drwxr-xr-x    2 defaultu defaultu      4096 May 18  2024 Whisperfish
drwxr-xr-x    4 defaultu defaultu      4096 Aug  4 10:19 YTPlayer
4

Ah, haha, I realised my mistake. The ownership of Pictures, Videos, and both Camera folders was set to defaultuser:defaultuser, which I had already changed to defaultuser:privileged through chown defaultuser:privileged /home/defaultuser/Pictures, etc, but I forgot to restart the phone (or maybe a home screen restart would have been enough) to make the background services notice the changes.

So, I restarted, and I can take pictures and videos now. Thanks for helping out!

4 Likes
5

Good!

There could have been better error messages from SFOS though.

6

True! Although I didn’t actually try starting the Camera app from the terminal, maybe that would have given a better indication of what was wrong. And it’s a situation I got myself into by not following the normal backup procedure, so either way it’s understandable that there’s no visual pop-up to tell the user to check if the folders have the right permissions and restart.

1 Like