The curious case of deleting .nomedia file

Deleting .nomedia file not enough to make a folder visible in android gallery

TL;DR: After removing .nomedia file, add/delete some file in that folder.

You might probably know that if you want to hide a folder from gallery all you have to do is create an empty file called .nomedia. This will make sure that the media scanner will skip that folder.

Sometime back I did this when I wanted to hide the Whatsapp folder from gallery. Now I changed my mind and want Whatsapp folder to show up in the gallery. So I did like any other guy would do -- I deleted .nomedia file from that folder. But this didn't work.

If I had any android version prior to Kitkat, I could've just run media scanner from some app. Unfortunately after Kitkat this wouldn't work (They changed how media scanner works to save battery).

Then I tried renaming the folder (after deleting .nomedia file). Magically, all the images started displaying in the gallery. However, I couldn't afford changing the name of the folder.

I realized that post jellybean, media scanner updates the media index only when there is a change in the folder. So, I just added a new image to that folder manually. It worked like a charm!

NOTE: If the folder is on sdcard, you can just remove the sdcard and put it back (after removing .nomedia file) to run media scanner.