Android app automatically storing videos and pictures locally.. why?

If I view a recorded motion video, it automatically saves to a new album in my gallery. If I click a camera and then back out of it, the preview picture that it generates under each camera also saves to another new album. It’s turning into a cluster in my gallery. I don’t want anything saved unless I specifically download it… And even then, it ends up saving to my main camera album. Why is simply viewing things creating albums on my phone? I tried to revoke permission but the app won’t function when I do that.

Edit: A new gallery is also created to store my pan scan waypoints. This all seems very unnecessary :man_shrugging:t2:

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I have noticed this more recently also. Should be able to have one folder for the wyze app to download anything into.

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Any update on this?

Hey LDelSanto86

By design, when you tap an Event thumbnail (12-sec cloud clip) if it is the first time you have viewed it, it is downloaded from the cloud and saved to a cache on your device.

If you access the same Event again, it is loaded from the cache (assuming you haven’t Cleared Cache in the interim.)

Wyze app > Account > App Settings > Cache File Size > Clear

Clearing cache will remove any auto-saved Event videos from your device.

Check out this topic (especially the Postscripts section) for some useful detail on the Android file system:

Is there any way to turn this feature off? Like I said, it clutters up my phone’s gallery and I don’t want to have to either clear the cache or delete the files manually every time I use the app. This also doesn’t address the thumbnails being saved for my Wyze PanCam waypoints.

I don’t understand the feature of caching the files to my device when there is already a dedicated download button… if it was something that I wanted to watch more than once I would just use that feature.

I tried to disable the permissions for storage access (as I never download clips, don’t want anything at all saved locally to my phone, and have SD cards in all of my cams) but when I do this, the app will not run. I don’t know why it’s necessary for the app to access my storage when I don’t want it to, nor should it be required to in order to view clips saved in a cloud or on my SD cards.

No. But you can do this:

I think the cache function exists to save network resources - both for Wyze (cloud server) and for the customer (data plan.) Plus it should be marginally faster to display from a local cache than a remote server.

With respect to thumbnail images from the Pan waypoints, etc, I expect it’s baked in. Permissions, too. There are Wishlist and Roadmap sections you can search through to see if like minded folks have already created a topic. If not, you can create your own in the Wishlist category.

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This is a REAL pain.
My mother views these cloud clips alot, and her phone keeps filling up with these 12sec WYZE vids to the point the phone is out of storage space and becomes so slow it is almost unusable.

Clearing the WYZE app cache does not clear out these vids.
They are all in /Wyze/Camera/Video.
Please add option to NOT store the cloud clips onto phone.

To be clear, the OP said the Gallery app on the phone, not the Wyze cache storage location (Internal storage > Wyze > Camera > Video). I view morning event footage and they are not ALL saved to my Gallery app - except a random still image, or video. I don’t even take still images, so that’s curious.

Again, not from the Gallery app. It will clear the location I mention above.

Hi Rick

I’ve been assuming a device’s native Gallery app (if present) is functionally equivalent to Google Photos, but that may be incorrect.

I use a Google/Asus tablet exclusively and it has only Google Photos operating as a gallery.

Currently, the Wyze Event cache folder contains no more than 3 videos at a time - either by design or because of a bug - so the cluttering of the Gallery no longer occurs.

@Bam noticed this change months ago and posted about it in this thread (I missed it.)

Before that, there appeared to be no upper limit to Event cache size. The largest I experienced was 1700+ files consuming ~2 gig of storage.

As the cache grew large it also caused the app to crash when attempting to access the Clear Cache and Hardware Decoder menus. That was my entrée into the subject.

@DreadPirateRush is another good source on this stuff.

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Don’t know what to tell you. No event videos are stored to my phone when I view them. No event videos are stored to Google Photos either - but I only use it as a back-up to the Samsung Gallery app. However, I often have random videos, or still images in the Gallery app on my phone. I’m constnatly deleting them.

To be clear, when I say “the cluttering of the gallery no longer occurs,” I mean large scale, ie, cluttered by hundreds of videos corresponding to the files in the Wyze Event cache.

I still have random Wyze Event videos automatically appearing in an album in the Google Photos app - which I think correspond to the constantly changing 3 videos stored in the Event cache folder.

Also, random stills from the Wyze app - which I think are camera-specific thumbnail images created automatically when you access a camera’s Live View, for example.

I can only speak to what I’m experiencing with Google Photos. And I accept the fact that your experience differs. :slight_smile:

You can’t stop the Wyze app from storing notification videos on your phone. If you want to view a notification, the app downloads it to your phone, first. This is better for people with limited data plans, because if you want to view the notification video again, the app doesn’t have to download it again. To get rid of the videos from your phone permanently, you have to clear the cache through, “Account”, and then the “App settings” page.

The functionality of the gallery app on Android is often misunderstood. It searches the entire phone for photo and video media. So, they’re not “in the gallery app”, they’re somewhere in a folder on the phone where the gallery app finds them. A common misconception is that media files are duplicated, but they aren’t, it just appears that way because the gallery app finds them where the other apps store them. There’s sometimes a way in the gallery app’s settings to “hide” folders, but the media is STILL there on the phone, just not shown in the gallery. Another way to “hide” the media, is to place a “.nomedia” file in the folder.

Changes in more recent versions of the app seem to be automatically clearing event videos more than it used to. If that is not your experience, I would recommend contacting support.

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