Get photos from droid Incredible internal memory with cracked screen?

January 25, 2011 10:39 PM

My daughter's Droid HTC Incredible screen cracked. We got the phone replaced, but many of her pictures that *should* have been on the SD card weren't. I assume that means they were saved to the phone's internal memory, but how can we access them to download, since the screen is cracked and we can't use the touch interface?

I've tried hooking the phone up to computers (both Linux and Windows), but I can't find the phones internal storage location, just a few mostly empty directories. She had lots of highly valued pics in there - does anyone know how to get there? Or, if we need to use a vendor, who could we call who could help with something like this?

posted by jasper411 to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Apparently it does video out.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 10:54 PM on January 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Who is your service provider and do they have brick-and-mortar stores / service centers?

I am very hard on phones and have done almost every horrible thing imaginable to mine, so I usually have to get a replacement at least twice a year. Whenever this happens, I just take my old phone and my new phone to the Verizon store near my house and their customer service technicians perform arcane acts of wizardry to transfer all my old stuff to my new phone. So far they have been able to do this even when my old phone appeared to be totally borked. I am in awe of their superpowers.
posted by Jacqueline at 11:03 PM on January 25, 2011

If USB Debugging was enabled before it bricked, which is unlikely unless your daughter went out of her way to do so, there's not going to be much they can do. If it *is* enabled, you could plug it in to your computer, root the phone and shell into it, and mount the internal storage OR at least browse through it over command prompt and pull the files that way.

If USB debug isn't enabled, I don't know what the Verizon folks can do, but maybe they have superpowers.
posted by disillusioned at 11:44 PM on January 25, 2011

The provide is Verizon, and we're going to try them. I just wondered if there was some other way, or some type of data recovery gurus who might know how to do it.
posted by jasper411 at 5:24 AM on January 26, 2011

When you have a storage card in and plug in the phone, you usually get offered two separate drives to mount, one is the internal storage and one is the card.

On my Incredible, both drives show a folder "DCIM" which a sub folder 100Media which contains the pictures.

Unless the camera was configured otherwise, this is where they are.
posted by plinth at 6:30 AM on January 26, 2011

Seconding plinth... a LOT of smartphones, when plugged into a PC, will be detected as both a new phone AND as a USB hard drive by the PC. It'll take a second for it to load up, but after that, it should be visible under My Computer as a new drive. You can either root around in there manually or do a Start/Search/For Files or Folders and search that drive for anything with a .JPG (or .JPEG) extension (note: this presumes you're on a PC; I'd imagine Macs have something similar).
posted by julthumbscrew at 6:32 AM on January 26, 2011