[Q] Gallery app stealing our dataz?

[rob-t]

So I was browsing through settings, and I found "Settings" -> "Data Manager" -> "Data Meter" displays a nice little daily graph of data use.

Then if you press "Show usage by activity" you get a nice little pie chart.

But oh noes! The "Gallery" app is using 40% of my dataz???

Why does an app for storing photos use a greater percentage of my data than "Browser" and "Touchdown" combined???

[paranoia]Unless... it is uploading my photos somewhere. Is Motorola/T-Mo archiving all my photos so that they can data mine them later?[/paranoia]

Gallery settings shed no light on this. Ideas on how to figure this out?

 

[chaihg]

Oh damn, u are right. What is it doing?. Syncing photos to Picasa or getting Picasa photos to mobile? me no techie but thats the only option I can think form Google point of view.

 

[chaihg]

And i noticed Connected Music Player using equally as much data as the gallery. Wonder how this is happening. I dont listen to anything like podcast or internet radio with the player. Hmmm. .

 

[psixda]

Count me in. I noticed that some days ago, still no clue :-\

Sent from my MB525 using XDA App

 

[rob-t]

Also, I should point out that I have had GPS turned off the entire time, and geotagging turned off on the camera.

Someone who has a bit more skill with the Shark for Root and Shark Reader apps can probably figure out what packets are going where and why... anyone?

EDIT: I'm blocking the app with DroidWall, a free firewall software. If you use it, make sure to set it to "blacklist" at the top and then check the two boxes next to "Media Storage, OMA Download, etc. etc." which is the one with "Gallery" in it. Then press the settings button on your Defy and choose "save rules". You can also enable logging - I am going to check back in a couple of days and see what the log says...

 

[Brent099]

Hmm, I would be interested in checking this out for myself, but I don't even have "data meter" in the data manager menu. The only option I see is "data delivery."

 

[scrannel]

Hmm, I would be interested in checking this out for myself, but I don't even have "data meter" in the data manager menu. The only option I see is "data delivery."

Same here, no such "meter" in mine. My phone is a T-Mobile USA branded phone. Was it deleted from later builds? BTW there is a discussion this same gallery/data issue on one of the Motorola forums.

 

[rob-t]

Yeah I should mention that I am running the Android 2.1 firmware v.2.34 european rom on my USA phone. T-Mo cripples a lot of the features that let you see what your phone is doing for the USA phones.

 

[heglen]

Question is, are these "- manager" apps reliable? A few days ago, when I was looking into Battery manager what had been using my power, Maps was hands down the biggest juice stealer at about 50%. "Mobile standby", "Phone Idle" and "Display" was somewhere between 4-25% each. I had my gps disabled, no Latitude, no navigation no nothing.

Now, however, Maps doesn´t even show up in that list, and I haven´t been making any adjustments, apart from a different launcher.

 

[arixal]

finally I found someone with the same problem with me.. I've already posted about this thing a few days ago in a different forum with no results..

and someone directs me here..

still hopes for some solutions.. my defy is a tmobile us defy using 2.34 central europe no-blur rom..

I haven't used any data connection since the revelation of gallery data abuse...

about batery meter.. it's true that maps would use most of the battery juice even though you just use it under 10 minutes... because if you turn them on, the most power drawn was from the display.. the GPS and data comes next.. so if in 2 days you don't use any of those.. the maps battery usage will certainly vanished from the battery meter..

 

[scrannel]

On the USA phone (and probably others) go into the INFO menu: dialer > *#*#4636#*#* > usage statistics > usage time/launch count/application name. Not the same as a pie chart for actual data used but it does seem to show what's being used and for how long and how often.

Then on the menu just before "usage statistics" there is "battery history" which has several selections including "network usage". If you tap on one of the applications listed you will get another menu that gives Bytes received and Bytes sent. The initial settings are:

"Since last unplugged"
"Total since boot"
"Total in all time"

 

[rob-t]

Thanks for the tip scrannel, I had forgotten about that.

So if I go to *#*#4636#*#*, then "battery history", then "network usage", then "Total in all time" my number one application is "Media". If I click on that, then it turns out that it is the same application package that contains Gallery - so that is why Gallery shows up on the pie chart.

The application package includes:

DRM Protected Content Storage
Download Manager
Gallery
Media Storage
MediaSync
OMA Download
com.motorola.android.oma.drm
com.motorola.android.wmdrm.dla

I would suspect that it is the Download Manager that is the culprit here. So I would assume that "Media" (aka "Gallery") is huge because of all of the files I have downloaded, and Browser is the separate list just web pages / html.

 

[scrannel]

I particularly like the category: "Total in all time"... like Android use going back to the Big Bang.

 

[SimboXXX]

I asked support about the 'Gallery' issue a few weeks ago. Their final reply, after some investigation was:

"We have checked this with our technicians and would like to say that this reading of data transferred in not accurate in the phone software. We have reported it to our engineers and it should be corrected in a future update.

For now, we can advise that to check the amount of data transferred you use the phone's data manager or some application from the Android Marketplace."

So, they say the data manager is not accurate and then advise you to use the data manager. There you have it.

One suggestion that makes some sense is that all the pictures downloaded in FB, Twitter etc. notifications are counted in the 'Gallery'.

 

[scrannel]

They said their data manager was not accurate and that you may find a better one on the market.

 

[rbeier1221]

Don't know about gallery, but connect music player will use some data for lyrics and other info....though maybe not as much as is being reported by what could be a bad data manager.

Sent from my ME525 using Tapatalk

 

[hazi1964]

Possible solution

Hi there, just got myself a Defy and have skimmed through this thread.

I think I MAY have solved this issue, though won't know for sure for at least a couple of hours (time to check usage etc)

If you go into settings, accounts, there will be your motoblur, google, facebook and any others you might have added.

If you stay on the list of accounts screen and tap menu, you will see a tab that says "picture source" Mine was selected as facebook so I deleted that account from there.

I am using a different facebook app now, just the standard facebook for android from the market that usually comes with the htc phones.

I have only just changed this setting so won't know for sure until it's been changed for a while.

It does mean that you won't be able to use the social networking app that comes with the phone unless you can set it to NOT use it as the picture source. I couldn't change mine so just deleted that account. You can still use facebook widgets, just don't use the internal social networking app.

Hope this is of some use to you all.

Alison

 

[Xexiz]

Gallery app just took 305mb in less than an hour.

Just had this problem with my new SGS3.. By chance I had a limit set on my data, but it still download in background 305mb.. can't find what it is. The "Sync Google Photos" and "Sync Picasa Web Albums" did not ran at all today so it's not the cause.. but I must find why it download that much on mobile data, when I was all night long on wifi so it should have download what it needs last night.

 

[merhans]

Just had this problem with my new SGS3.. By chance I had a limit set on my data, but it still download in background 305mb.. can't find what it is. The "Sync Google Photos" and "Sync Picasa Web Albums" did not ran at all today so it's not the cause.. but I must find why it download that much on mobile data, when I was all night long on wifi so it should have download what it needs last night.

Please post your problem in s3 thread because of different hardware and software. You wont get a solution here for this problem.
So my advice, post it in a s3 thread to get the best help.

 

[Xexiz]

Please post your problem in s3 thread because of different hardware and software. You wont get a solution here for this problem.
So my advice, post it in a s3 thread to get the best help.

Yeah, sorry about that. I noticed after posting, and then post it in general Q/A.
Thanks