Getting photos from a SD card to an Android phone.

[yoav]

Quick question to anyone with an Android phone. If I plug in a SD card reader into the USB-C port and put I a SD card with photos on it, will the phone (a new Samsung galaxy) automatically load the pictures onto the phone’s photo album. This is what happens with an iPhone but I’m asking for a non-techy friend with an Android phones who wants to do this, before I tell them to buy an SD card reader. Thanks.

[Polar Bear]

As an android user I would say that an automatic upload is unlikely* but provided that the phone recognises the reader as an otg device then it will be easy to copy the images and other files in both directions.

I speak as a user of a 3 year old Samsung.  I tend to plug my phone via cable into my pc and transfer images back and forth that way.  The pc can access the phone storage under Windows 10** and it's just like any other day-to-day file management for me.

* doesn't happen on my 3 year old Samsung Galaxy S9
** probably other versions of Windows and other OS too.

[grams]

Yeah you likely need to do it using the Files app, though there may be some Samsung bloatwareutility to do it for you.

If it's a MicroSD card the phone probably has a slot and no extra hardware required. Most phones don't make this convenient for regular use - on some you have to pop the SIM card out to access it.

[Kim]

^ This.

IOS tries to make things easy for the user, by pretending not to have a filesystem wherever possible.  Which is fine until it isn't.

Android is more sensible, and lets you copy files from one place to another like grown-ups.  Possible gotchas are the absence of a file manager app (easily solved by installing one) and it not being entirely clear where the phone is keeping its own photos (you might have to dig around a bit).  But ultimately, it's no different to copying files on a Windows/Mac/Linux desktop PC.

[quixoticgeek]

I plug a USB-C SD card reader into my phone, it pops up to say it's there, I can then browse the photos using the files app. There's no automagic copying tho.

J

[yoav]

Thanks, my friend's new phone has no microSD slot (the old one did) so they want their photos on the new phone. using the files app to copy the files manually should be ok.

[Lightning Phil]

Tell them to stick the photos in Google photos via a laptop / PC etc. It’ll sync across to the phone next time the turn data / WiFi etc.

[nuttycyclist]

Quick question to anyone with an Android phone. If I plug in a SD card reader into the USB-C port and put I a SD card with photos on it, will the phone (a new Samsung galaxy) automatically load the pictures onto the phone’s photo album. This is what happens with an iPhone but I’m asking for a non-techy friend with an Android phones who wants to do this, before I tell them to buy an SD card reader. Thanks.

This reminds me of when my parents asked me to sort their laptop out as for no reason it had run out of space.  They had accidentally installed iTunes and apple had copied their entire media library to its own one, and the Apple version was 150% the size of the original one.

One uninstall of AppleCrap later, a manual deletion of all the files it had left behind, a defrag to sort the disk out, and it was back to running as badly as windoze does.

[Kim]

iTunes on Windows.  Never a good idea.  I'm suspicious they make it bad deliberately, so that people buy a Mac to go with their iThing.

[yoav]

My friend doesn't have a computer, only a phone, hence  my question.

[Kim]

My friend doesn't have a computer, only a phone, hence  my question.

Baffling though it may seem, this is increasingly common.  Especially amongst young people.

(I'd suggest that in this scenario some sort of cloudy photo hosting service may be the way forward, given the tendency for phones to get broken/stolen more easily than Proper Computers.)

[Polar Bear]

I plug a USB-C SD card reader into my phone, it pops up to say it's there, I can then browse the photos using the files app. There's no automagic copying tho.

J

I ordered one of these as soon as I saw this post and it dropped through the letterbox ten minutes ago.  I bunged a card with pictures and videos on it into the gizmo, plugged it into my 3 year old Galaxy S9 and spent a good oh, 30 seconds figuring out how to transfer files back and forth. 

It's not quite intuitive but almost.  One for the camera bag now methinks.

Thanks for the link QG.