There is a particular kind of quiet disappointment that comes from opening the Favorites album on a new phone and finding it empty. The photos are all there. Twenty thousand of them, exactly as they were. But the few hundred you actually cared about, the ones you tapped a star on over five years, are no longer distinguishable from the rest.
This happens to almost everyone eventually, and it is not a bug. It is a direct consequence of where that star is stored. Once you understand the mechanism, both the loss and the fix become obvious.
The star is not in your photo
When you favorite a photo on Android, nothing about the image file changes. The bytes on disk are byte-for-byte identical before and after you tap the star. What changes is a single column in a database that Android maintains separately, called MediaStore. Your photo gets a row in that database, and one field in that row flips from 0 to 1.
That database lives in your phone's internal storage, owned by the system, and it is rebuilt from scratch whenever the media scanner has reason to start over. It is not a file you can find, copy, or email to yourself. On a Samsung Galaxy the Gallery app reads that same field, which is why the Favorites album is best understood as a saved search rather than a real folder. Nothing is actually in it.
Worth knowing: this standardized field only arrived in Android 11. Before that, every gallery app kept its own private list of favorites in its own private storage, which was even less portable. If you have carried photos across more than a couple of phones, you may have lost the same favorites more than once for two different reasons.
What actually happens during a backup
Every mainstream backup tool does the same fundamental thing: it walks your storage, finds image and video files, and uploads copies of those files. Google Photos does this. Samsung Cloud does this. OneDrive, Dropbox, and a USB cable to your laptop all do this.
None of them read the MediaStore favorites column, because there is nowhere sensible to put it. The destination has no equivalent field, and even if it did, the file format has no slot for it. So the upload succeeds, every photo arrives safely, and the flag is simply not part of the payload.
| Thing | Survives? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The image itself | Yes | It is the file being copied. |
| Date taken, camera, exposure | Yes | Stored as EXIF inside the file. |
| GPS location | Usually | Also EXIF, though some services strip it. |
| Your favorite star | No | Lives in a phone database, not in the file. |
| Album and folder names | Sometimes | Depends entirely on the service. |
The confusing part is that Google Photos has its own Favorites feature, complete with its own star icon. It looks like the same thing. It is not. Google Photos favorites are stored in your Google account and have no connection to the star you tapped in Samsung Gallery. Favoriting in one has never propagated to the other, in either direction.
The five moments people lose their favorites
Because the flag lives in a rebuildable database rather than in your files, anything that resets that database takes the stars with it. In rough order of how often it catches people out:
- Moving to a new phone. Transfer tools copy files. The new phone builds a fresh MediaStore, and every row starts at zero.
- A factory reset, including the kind a repair shop performs without asking.
- Clearing the Gallery app's storage or cache, which people are routinely told to do as a fix for unrelated problems.
- Restoring from a cloud backup after a loss. The photos come home, the stars do not.
- Switching gallery apps, or a major system update that changes how media is indexed.
The fifth one is the cruelest, because nothing visibly went wrong. Samsung's own community forums carry a steady stream of these reports, including people who opened their Favorites album to find it empty while their full library of several thousand photos sat there untouched.
Why backing up everything does not fix it
The standard advice is to back up your whole library and stop worrying. That advice protects your photos, and it is worth following. But it does not address what was actually lost.
Favoriting is an act of curation. If you have twenty thousand photos and you starred four hundred, you spent real attention separating the four hundred from the rest. A complete backup preserves twenty thousand undifferentiated files. The curation is what got deleted, and the curation is the part that took you years.
The photos were never the scarce thing. Knowing which ones mattered was.
The actual problem, stated plainly
There is a storage dimension too. A full library backup of twenty thousand photos and videos is comfortably over 100 GB, which pushes most people past the free tier of whatever service they use. Your four hundred favorites are perhaps 2 GB. Most people would happily pay to protect the 2 GB and are reluctant to pay to protect the rest, but the tools available give them no way to express that preference.
What actually preserves a favorite
If the problem is that the star lives outside the file, the fix is to put it inside the file. This is a solved problem, and it has been solved since well before smartphones existed.
The standard is XMP, an Adobe-originated specification for embedding metadata directly into an image. Among its fields is a rating from zero to five stars, plus a text label. Professional photographers have relied on it for two decades precisely because it travels with the photo. Copy the file to a different drive, a different operating system, or a different continent, and the rating is still in there, because it is part of the same bytes as the picture.
A photo carrying an XMP rating of five will show as five stars in Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, digiKam, XnView, Photo Mechanic, and Windows File Explorer, with no configuration and no plugin. Nothing needs to know where the photo came from.
Check your own library in about a minute
You do not have to take any of this on faith. Pick a photo you have starred, and:
- Copy it to a computer over a USB cable.
- On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties, and open the Details tab. On a Mac, open it in Preview and show the inspector.
- Look for a rating. There will not be one.
The date, the camera model, and usually the GPS coordinates all made the trip, because those are written into the file. The star did not, because it never was.
How Favorites Gallery handles it
Favorites Gallery was built around this specific gap. It reads the favorites flag from MediaStore, which is the same source your Gallery app reads, so it sees exactly the photos you starred and nothing else. It then copies only those files, and for JPEG photos it writes an XMP rating of five and a Favorite label into each copy before that copy goes anywhere.
The consequence is that the backup is self-describing. Years from now, on hardware that does not exist yet, those files will still identify themselves as the ones you chose. No app, no account, and no database required. Your originals are never modified: the rating is written into the copy, and the photo in your camera roll is left exactly as the camera wrote it.
It is a narrow tool that does one thing. That is deliberate. The problem is narrow too, and it has gone unaddressed for years mostly because it is easy to mistake for a problem that general backup software already solves.