Galaxy S20 Camera

[Souzdal]

Of late, every time I use my Galaxy S20 phone's camera there are issues with the focus. Is there something in the settings possibly?

 

[ocnbrze]

Try wiping cache and data for the camera and see if that helps. Have you tried rebooting the phone? Last resort is a factory reset.

 

[Souzdal]

Try wiping cache and data for the camera and see if that helps. Have you tried rebooting the phone? Last resort is a factory reset.

Thanks, sill question, how wipe cache and data and what else will that affect?

 

[olbriar]

You will want to wipe the cache of the camera app. Make certain that the camera lenses area clean.... using a micro fiber cloth. Unless you have have altered the camera settings, you should be getting stellar pics. If all else fails, a factory reset will set everything back to factory fresh including the camera settings. If you do a factory reset, be certain to back up everything for they will be wiped from the phone. If the factory reset is not the answer, it's likely that you are experiencing a hardware problem of some sort.

 

[Souzdal]

You will want to wipe the cache of the camera app. Make certain that the camera lenses area clean.... using a micro fiber cloth. Unless you have have altered the camera settings, you should be getting stellar pics. If all else fails, a factory reset will set everything back to factory fresh including the camera settings. If you do a factory reset, be certain to back up everything for they will be wiped from the phone. If the factory reset is not the answer, it's likely that you are experiencing a hardware problem of some sort.

Sorry will wiping the camera cache delete any photos in the albums I set up?

 

[ocnbrze]

Sorry will wiping the camera cache delete any photos in the albums I set up?

Nope. I would make sure that you have your photos saved with Google Photos. This way you never have to worry any
about losing them.

 

[Hadron]

Sorry will wiping the camera cache delete any photos in the albums I set up?

Your photos are saved to your filesystem, they are not part of either the camera app or the gallery app's data (the camera is just the thing you used to record them, the gallery app is just an app for viewing images that are stored on your device, neither actually owns the files). If you set up albums within the gallery app then which photo is in which album will be part of the gallery app's data, but nothing to do with the camera.

Caches are by definition where an app stores temporary files, so you don't lose anything by clearing those.

Clearing your camera app's data would put all of your camera settings back to default, but would not delete existing photos. That might be worth considering if clearing its cache doesn't help.

But do check simple things as well: smears on the lens may blur photos, if you have turned the flash to "always on" that will result in a delay when taking photos (which may be mistaken for "this is taking a long time to focus"), and there is a filter called "soft" that will reduce detail in images. I can't see much else in my s21's camera settings that could do something like this (if you touch the screen before taking a photo it may focus on the wrong thing, but you'd see what was going on there).

 

[svim]

I'd suggest before deleting anything you look into the Settings menu of Camera app itself first. It sounds like that some auto-focus option has been inadvertently disabled.
Some more advanced photographers disable auto-focus features so they can set up a shot to their own needs, but most of us just rely upon auto-focus.