LG Optimus F5 — LG Stylo 3 - nomedia files and garbled folder reinstalls - reset did not fix

Hi All,

Newbie to the forum.

As my life becomes more and more integrated and intertwined with this android device I now own, I'm steadily learning more about how to troubleshoot.

This one has me stumped enough to ask for help - I suppose I should really just get used to it because I have found that deciphering how phone device interfaces work is proving more difficult than perhaps the impression the stock launchers might insinuate based on their language and response behavior.

I've just gone ahead and uploaded some screenshots to give you an idea of what I'm looking at. It's hard to articulate for me.

h t t p s : / / i b b . c o / a l b u m / d H d 0 r F

In this album, you'll notice there are "nomedia" files that pop up in my file manager.

I'll try to offer some sort of guiding background on why this might be happening.

A while back I had new problems arising with my google photos not syncing my videos properly. When I would delete a video from my internal gallery, and it's respective trash, the video in google photos that had been working and playing reverted to a permanent "processing" overlay image.

After asking for help on google product forums, I just factory reset the phone, and it solved the issue. I never really found out the original issue, which is something I found slightly easier to diagnose with desktop computers than I seem to be able to do with android - everything seems to end with the almighty Reset option.... In my mind this option seems to be an approximate equivalent to cold-booting a computer, in regards to effectiveness. Android resets seem to help initially, but if a user doesn't know what behavior prompted their device to glitch, they cannot necessarily know how to prevent it from happening again. It sometimes feels as though I am in the minority. I digress.

Recently the issue with google photos came back again but slightly differently - now my google photos is bringing up a ton of temp folders that build up thumbnails or whatever, as well as ad cache videos and images from when I play app games and asks me if I want to sync. These albums, simply named "images", keep manifesting when they never did that before. I delete them, they come back.

It gets better. I started realizing what nomedia files were from the internet and started looking for them in my file manager. I found them everywhere, including my sd card, in all sorts of subfolders. I also saw a garbled folder name with a nomedia file in it in my internal storage and deleted that too.

Google photos starts working properly again, finally syncing well.

But then the folder with the garbled name came back, and a couple of nomedia files also, along with those "csm" install and uninstall files. (Nothing has resurfaced in my sd card). Google Photos started having problems again.

It gets better. Then I noticed a bunch of images coming up in my gallery but not being uploaded into google photos except for maybe one time - screenshots of when I'm typing in quickmemo. They look like a screengrab type file if anyone is familiar with that firefox addon - it's a long image mostly white space but whatever I typed near the top.

I have installed and scanned my phone with security master from cheetah, which they have bragging rights for because av test apparently said they're the best antivirus program after their testing.

My results all came back clean. Still the nomedia files persist, and always are certainly there after a clean-out/restart cycle I do once or twice daily.

I am wondering if any of this even has anything to do with google photos honestly but idk.

Whatever feedback you might have, feel free to let me know.

Thank you.