Screenshot is a really great utility made by the great Antony Pranata for S60 devices and is one of the must have utilities for any mobile blogger. With that said, I’ll reveal you how Screenshot helped me to find how images eat up memory on your phone.

As my phone’s memory was full, I was looking for stuff to delete this morning. While browsing through the directories (using X-Plore ), I came to one of my screenshot folders and when I checked its details, it had taken 1.2MB of my memory. So I deleted 16 out of the 20 screenshots that were in the folder, but it was still taking 684KB of my phone memory. I wondered.. I usually use JPEG Low Quality for my screenshots.. It’s just then I noticed that I had turned Show Hidden Files functionality off in my X-Plore. I turned it on and, here comes the hidden ones.. Under each Screenshots folder was a folder called _PAlbTN which stored thumbnails of each Screenshot in that folder using 170×128, 320×320 and 56×42 resolutions. While looking around a bit, I realised that these _PAlbTN folders were available for other image directories too and that these were created by the S60 OS itself and that the OS creates these thumbnails not only for Screenshots, but for each and every image in the phone (ie – even if it is a single image, a _PAlbTN directory is created just for it wherever it is) . So for each image on your phone, you store four copies of it in your memory (either on phone or memory card depending on where you store the image). The bad thing is that (it seems) these thumbnails are not deleted even when you delete the original image. So they eat up a huge amount of your memory and as the OS makes copies wherever the images are (doesn’t matter whether you save 299 images in ten folders inside Images folder and one in the root directory of Sounds folder, it always makes eleven _PAlbTN folders in all those places), it might be a disadvantage for you to store your images in many folders too. So, this is how stored images eat up your phone memory and I believe keeping the images properly organized may reduce the size they take (as each new created _PAlbTN directory takes some amount of memory). Did any of you find out any method to reduce the size of _PAlbTNs ? Or any different behaviour of these (like I realised that thumbnails for camera images are stored somewhere else and not in the respective folders ) ? Comments are welcome.

NOTICE: Do not fiddle too much with your system folders – it is *extremely* dangerous and I shall not be responsible for whatever results you may get by doing so.

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