If you have landed here, the situation is probably this: your photos are all present and correct, but the Favorites album is empty or badly thinned out. Nothing was deleted. The stars are just gone.
The good news is that your photos are not at risk. The favorites flag is separate from your image files, so losing it never means losing pictures. The bad news is that this same separation is why some causes cannot be undone. Work through the checks below in order, because they run cheapest first.
Step 1: Restart, then wait
A plain restart resolves a real share of these cases. Android's media index can be mid-rebuild, and a Favorites album reading empty is exactly what an incomplete index looks like from the outside.
The part people skip is the waiting. After a restart, and especially after a system update, the media scanner may need anywhere from several minutes to over an hour to walk a large library. Leave the phone plugged in, leave it alone, and check again later before concluding anything.
Step 2: Check whether the album is empty or just hidden
An album that is filtered out looks identical to an album that has been emptied. Rule this out before going further:
- In Gallery, open the menu and look for a setting along the lines of Show hidden albums or Manage albums, and make sure nothing relevant is switched off.
- Check the Recycle bin. It holds deleted items for around 30 days, and a photo sitting in there will not appear in Favorites.
- Confirm you are looking at the right app. Samsung Gallery and Google Photos both have a Favorites view, and they are entirely separate lists. It is easy to check one while your stars are in the other.
Step 3: Check whether Cloud Sync changed what you are looking at
If Gallery is syncing with OneDrive or Samsung Cloud, the view can be showing you a merged or partially downloaded library rather than purely local files. A sync that is incomplete, paused, or signed out can make items vanish from filtered views like Favorites while remaining perfectly safe.
Open Gallery settings, find the cloud or sync section, and confirm the account is still signed in and the sync has finished. If it is mid-sync, this is another case for waiting rather than intervening.
Step 4: Work out which event caused it
This step decides whether to keep going. The favorites flag lives in Android's MediaStore database rather than in your photos, so anything that rebuilt that database took the flags with it permanently.
| What happened recently | Recoverable? |
|---|---|
| Nothing in particular, stars just went | Often. Keep going, a restart and patience frequently resolve it. |
| A system or One UI update | Sometimes. Give the media scan an hour before deciding. |
| Cleared Gallery storage or cache | No. That is the database being reset. |
| Factory reset, or a repair visit | No. |
| Set up a new phone from a transfer | No. Flags were never part of the transfer. |
| Restored photos from a cloud backup | No. Backups carry files, not flags. |
If your row says no, stop here. There is no tool, paid or free, that recovers those flags, and any product claiming otherwise is selling something that cannot work. The information was never written into your photos, so there is nothing in them to read back. Recovery software can undelete files. It cannot undelete a database column that described them.
Step 5: If they are genuinely gone, rebuild selectively
Re-starring twenty thousand photos is not realistic, but you rarely need to. Favorites cluster around events, and sorting by date makes them findable in bulk. Work backwards through the trips, birthdays, and occasions you remember, and accept that you are reconstructing the important ninety percent rather than the exact original set.
Do this once. Then make sure it cannot happen again, because if you leave the setup unchanged, the next update or the next phone will produce the same afternoon.
Making it permanent
The durable fix is to stop relying on a flag that sits outside your files. The XMP standard stores a zero to five star rating inside the image itself, which is how professional photo tools have handled this for two decades. A rating embedded that way cannot be reset by a cache clear, a factory reset, or a new phone, because it is part of the same bytes as the picture.
Favorites Gallery reads the same MediaStore flag your Gallery app uses, copies only the photos carrying it, and writes an XMP five-star rating into each JPEG copy before it leaves the device. Your originals are untouched. What changes is that the backup can now identify itself, so the curation survives even when the database does not.