How to find photos on my phone that I put into albums?

So when I connect my phone to my PC (LG v20), I can get all my “normal” photos - under DCIM/Camera

But for the life of me, I can’t find ANY of my photos I’ve put into albums.

I’m just using the stock Gallery app that comes on Android if that’s any help.

I need to download these & right now my only solution is to go into each photo individually and share it with dropbox and it then shows up in my dropbox folder on my PC.

Looking for a way to do mass copies

You might have better luck (I.e. preserving albums) with Google Photos or Google Drive since you’re running Android. I’m a late adopter and have trouble with this sort of stuff too.

Google photos, my man. It will sync any you CAN find and mark, just leave your phone on wireless and plugged in until done.

In the future, set that up with whichever cloud app you want with a new phone (it sounds like you’re getting one.) Skip having to worry about local storage on the device if at all possible.

As an example of what Google Photos can do, it will pull exif locations, analyze picture contents and help you archive things that are static and low use. So things like receipt pictures pops up an “archive these?” question, while you can also do content searches for terms like, “San Diego,” pets, or food and pull actual content related by dkim or even the content of the picture with the search in your Google Photos. It’s amazing and well worth using.

Because an actual picture is worth a thousand words, this is an example of what I’m talking about. I have not tagged photos in any way. This pulls data from when the picture was taken and if using location data on your phone, from where you were. It’s also doing some crazy content interpretation of the photos as part of the search. I install a lot of network gear. Here I’m searching for, “wiring.”

EDIT: exif, not dkim. I’m confusing work acronyms with picture metadata.

Can I somehow get an app like google photos to take over the albums so they’ll do this from now on?

I just am crazy I can’t directly access the albums I had. Since this was the default gallery app, isn’t that a google/android basic app?

Google Photos, three lines at the top left, Photos on Device, click on one of the folders, move Backup and Sync to the right to turn it on. Do this for all your folders with pics.

If you don’t see them check for an app like Verizon Backup and make sure they weren’t uploaded to that cloud instead. If so, click to grab them all back again.

There is no default Android gallery app other than Google Photos. Anything called gallery will be from your device manufacturer/carrier.

As for your specific problem, I would suggest a) Using Airdroid and seeing if they show up in that. If so just drag them off the phone. b) Don’t know if something like WinDirStat would work on a phone connected via USB, but it’s worth a try.

Note that there may be a storage limit if you use Google Photos and/or Google Drive. I think it is 15GB cumulative. If you need more than that then you will need to pay for additional storage.