Can DJI FLY app save cached video to phone's SD card instead of main memory?

[nealix]

My android phone has very little main memory left, so if I let the DJI Fly app save cached video, then it saves the video files to the main memory of the phone and overflows it.
But I have over 120GB of free space on the phones SD card slot. The android camera and other apps will save their images to the phones auxilliary sd card to save the main
memory.

I can't find a setting on the DJI Fly app that will tell it to use the extra memory on the phone's SD card, instead of the phone's main memory.
Has DJI not added this capability yet? It seems a silly omission, since most phones (except Apple) permit extra SD cards, and video is a space hog.

Thanks,

Neal

 

[Deleted member 103366]

Whilst I can not answer your question I would ask, is whatever is eating memory space on the phone necessary? Can it not be moved to the card etc.?
Also why do you want to cache video, are not the videos on the drone's mSD card of better quality?
Is this relevant Save to SD card and not to phone memory ?

 

[nealix]

Also why do you want to cache video, are not the videos on the drone's mSD card of better quality?

Simply because: If your drone fails, crashes where you can't get to it, or even malfunctions and falls in water, the lower resolution cached video will give you a record of what happened. It is specifically a lower resolution video backup file if you can't find or get to your Drone/SDcard. It is useful.
But not so much if DJI will not add the option to let you use the Android Phone's SDcard as secondary storage, like so many other Android apps already do.

 

[Deleted member 103366]

Would a screen capture app serve the same purpose and perhaps offer the option of where to save the video? It seems Xrecorder might but as the phone it is on does not have an 'external' memory card I am a bit stuck lol

 

[karlblessing]

I asked DJI about this before and they couldn't give me an answer on using the phone's SD card versus Internal.

Seems like the only way you can achieve it if you have an android is to format the SD card as "Internal" but that has it's own slew of problems depending on the brand and OS you use.

 

[Rassal]

No you can get it to work. I am using a Galaxy Tab S7 and Galaxy Note20 Ultra and both are running DJI Fly 1.4.0 and running off the SD Card.

• To do so, you need to enable developer mode, to do so, do the following:
• Go to Settings on said device's.Then go to System. Tap on About Phone. Scroll down and tap on Build Number until it says either congratulations you are now developer, or it pops up you have activated Developer Mode.
• Next, you need to go back into the settings area and tap on System.
• From here tap on Advanced and scroll down to the bottom where you will see {} Developer Options.
• Tap on {} Developer Options and scroll to near the bottom where you will see an option to Force allow apps on external, check this option to its on state, it will be greyed out at first.
• Once this is enabled, go back into the settings area and tap on Applications.
• Find the DJI Fly app, then tap on it.
• On the Storage section of the DJI Fly app, it should be using Internal Storage, tap on Storage then in the Storage utilities, tap on Modify and select your SD Card.
• This will move your DJI Fly App to the SD Card along with all cached data and files, and from there, it should be saying that it's running of External Storage (SD Card).

For me, this moved the cached info of DJY Fly app to the SD Card (it was using like 9gb of storage) to the SD Card, and i have now 9gb freed on my Phone and this used 9gb on my SD Card. All other video/pictures i took with DJI Fly all got saved to the SD Card.

Bingo!

 

[Bodkin's Best Photography]

No you can get it to work. I am using a Galaxy Tab S7 and Galaxy Note20 Ultra and both are running DJI Fly 1.4.0 and running off the SD Card.

• To do so, you need to enable developer mode, to do so, do the following:
• Go to Settings on said device's.Then go to System. Tap on About Phone. Scroll down and tap on Build Number until it says either congratulations you are now developer, or it pops up you have activated Developer Mode.
• Next, you need to go back into the settings area and tap on System.
• From here tap on Advanced and scroll down to the bottom where you will see {} Developer Options.
• Tap on {} Developer Options and scroll to near the bottom where you will see an option to Force allow apps on external, check this option to its on state, it will be greyed out at first.
• Once this is enabled, go back into the settings area and tap on Applications.
• Find the DJI Fly app, then tap on it.
• On the Storage section of the DJI Fly app, it should be using Internal Storage, tap on Storage then in the Storage utilities, tap on Modify and select your SD Card.
• This will move your DJI Fly App to the SD Card along with all cached data and files, and from there, it should be saying that it's running of External Storage (SD Card).

For me, this moved the cached info of DJY Fly app to the SD Card (it was using like 9gb of storage) to the SD Card, and i have now 9gb freed on my Phone and this used 9gb on my SD Card. All other video/pictures i took with DJI Fly all got saved to the SD Card.

Bingo!

Using the Samsung a20 and this works. Thanks, man!

 

[teeroy]

No you can get it to work. I am using a Galaxy Tab S7 and Galaxy Note20 Ultra and both are running DJI Fly 1.4.0 and running off the SD Card.

• To do so, you need to enable developer mode, to do so, do the following:
• Go to Settings on said device's.Then go to System. Tap on About Phone. Scroll down and tap on Build Number until it says either congratulations you are now developer, or it pops up you have activated Developer Mode.
• Next, you need to go back into the settings area and tap on System.
• From here tap on Advanced and scroll down to the bottom where you will see {} Developer Options.
• Tap on {} Developer Options and scroll to near the bottom where you will see an option to Force allow apps on external, check this option to its on state, it will be greyed out at first.
• Once this is enabled, go back into the settings area and tap on Applications.
• Find the DJI Fly app, then tap on it.
• On the Storage section of the DJI Fly app, it should be using Internal Storage, tap on Storage then in the Storage utilities, tap on Modify and select your SD Card.
• This will move your DJI Fly App to the SD Card along with all cached data and files, and from there, it should be saying that it's running of External Storage (SD Card).

For me, this moved the cached info of DJY Fly app to the SD Card (it was using like 9gb of storage) to the SD Card, and i have now 9gb freed on my Phone and this used 9gb on my SD Card. All other video/pictures i took with DJI Fly all got saved to the SD Card.

Bingo!

Awesome! Worked on my Samsung Galaxy S9...thank you!

 

[steve coulthard]

No you can get it to work. I am using a Galaxy Tab S7 and Galaxy Note20 Ultra and both are running DJI Fly 1.4.0 and running off the SD Card.

• To do so, you need to enable developer mode, to do so, do the following:
• Go to Settings on said device's.Then go to System. Tap on About Phone. Scroll down and tap on Build Number until it says either congratulations you are now developer, or it pops up you have activated Developer Mode.
• Next, you need to go back into the settings area and tap on System.
• From here tap on Advanced and scroll down to the bottom where you will see {} Developer Options.
• Tap on {} Developer Options and scroll to near the bottom where you will see an option to Force allow apps on external, check this option to its on state, it will be greyed out at first.
• Once this is enabled, go back into the settings area and tap on Applications.
• Find the DJI Fly app, then tap on it.
• On the Storage section of the DJI Fly app, it should be using Internal Storage, tap on Storage then in the Storage utilities, tap on Modify and select your SD Card.
• This will move your DJI Fly App to the SD Card along with all cached data and files, and from there, it should be saying that it's running of External Storage (SD Card).

For me, this moved the cached info of DJY Fly app to the SD Card (it was using like 9gb of storage) to the SD Card, and i have now 9gb freed on my Phone and this used 9gb on my SD Card. All other video/pictures i took with DJI Fly all got saved to the SD Card.

Bingo!

Thanks for this, I had 1gb of storage left on the phone, but 58gb on the sd card!

 

[washbrook]

Thank you so much for this info Rassal.... how you work all that out is amazing but I am a very grateful pensioner with space on my phones internal memory now as it works a treat with my SD card on my Galaxy S9+ as well... thankyou so much

 

[karlblessing]

Bare in mind that if you move the entire app to the SD card you may suffer some performance/stability issues depending on both the quality of the SD card (which is a lot slower than internal memory) or the bus speed of the phone's interface to the card, especially if the app has a habit of saving a bunch of smaller log-like files.

I would say for best results, make sure the micro-SD is a U3/A2 type of card at the very least and not a U1/A1 (class-10), so that if your phone supports the higher speeds, it'll work better that way. (basically the same kind of card you'd need for any of the drones that save at 100Mbps or higher bit rate, as Class 10/U1 is only good for 80Mbps and below).

 

[moldorf]

I have both AZ Recorder and XRecorder on my Tripltek. In the settings, both allow the option of recording the video on an MicroSD card. Easy to make that change. The one 'warning' both apps give is that if you ever uninstall either app, it will erase all the data on the card. That didn't make a lot of sense to me but since the tablet has 256 GB of internal space it's no problem storing the videos there

then it's easy to download to my desktop for editing and archiving

 

[LoudThunder]

I can't find a setting on the DJI Fly app that will tell it to use the extra memory on the phone's SD card, instead of the phone's main memory.

I do not like all the imagery eating up all my storage either and I'm pretty versed with this and it apparently is not an option. What I usually do is manually move the imagery over to the MicroSD Card. You can do on in Android but it's more cumbersome, so I usually plug my Tablet into my computer and use Windows File Manager. It's so much easier to format new directories for photos and videos and organize them as you see fit (date, location, etc…).

This issue with not being able to save your imagery on the external storage is not just a DJI issue, a lot of Apps are so poorly written that you cannot store the data elsewhere either.

I'm not saying the DJI Apps are poorly written, but what you have to consider is that the DJI Apps have to write a lot telemetry data as well as your video Imagery to record and depending on how they implemented the Editor, it would also have to be updated and changed to reflect the new storage location.

 

[Bodkin's Best Photography]

I do not like all the imagery eating up all my storage either and I'm pretty versed with this and it apparently is not an option. What I usually do is manually move the imagery over to the MicroSD Card. You can do on in Android but it's more cumbersome, so I usually plug my Tablet into my computer and use Windows File Manager. It's so much easier to format new directories for photos and videos and organize them as you see fit (date, location, etc…).

This issue with not being able to save your imagery on the external storage is not just a DJI issue, a lot of Apps are so poorly written that you cannot store the data elsewhere either.

I'm not saying the DJI Apps are poorly written, but what you have to consider is that the DJI Apps have to write a lot telemetry data as well as your video Imagery to record and depending on how they implemented the Editor, it would also have to be updated and changed to reflect the new storage location.

Can DJI FLY app save cached video to phone's SD card instead of main memory?

My android phone has very little main memory left, so if I let the DJI Fly app save cached video, then it saves the video files to the main memory of the phone and overflows it. But I have over 120GB of free space on the phones SD card slot. The android camera and other apps will save their...

mavicpilots.com

A solution that's been around for at least a year.

 

[LoudThunder]

No you can get it to work. I am using a Galaxy Tab S7 and Galaxy Note20 Ultra and both are running DJI Fly 1.4.0 and running off the SD Card.

• To do so, you need to enable developer mode, to do so, do the following:
• Go to Settings on said device's.Then go to System. Tap on About Phone. Scroll down and tap on Build Number until it says either congratulations you are now developer, or it pops up you have activated Developer Mode.
• Next, you need to go back into the settings area and tap on System.
• From here tap on Advanced and scroll down to the bottom where you will see {} Developer Options.
• Tap on {} Developer Options and scroll to near the bottom where you will see an option to Force allow apps on external, check this option to its on state, it will be greyed out at first.
• Once this is enabled, go back into the settings area and tap on Applications.
• Find the DJI Fly app, then tap on it.
• On the Storage section of the DJI Fly app, it should be using Internal Storage, tap on Storage then in the Storage utilities, tap on Modify and select your SD Card.
• This will move your DJI Fly App to the SD Card along with all cached data and files, and from there, it should be saying that it's running of External Storage (SD Card).

For me, this moved the cached info of DJY Fly app to the SD Card (it was using like 9gb of storage) to the SD Card, and i have now 9gb freed on my Phone and this used 9gb on my SD Card. All other video/pictures i took with DJI Fly all got saved to the SD Card.

Bingo!

I followed your instructions to the letter, it did not work properly and now my DJI Fly App is Not working properly…

I am using a Samsung Galaxy Tablet S2 (8" Screen), 3 GB Ram with 32 GB Internal Storage with a 32 GB MicroSD Card. I am running the latest version of the Fly App 1.6.4.

Frist off, I Do Not blame you, your instructions were complete, easy to follow, and should have worked…

I have posted two Screen Shots; "Screen 1" shows the screen that pops up when you select External Storage. "Screen 2" indicates it's transferring after I tapped the "Move" on Screen 1. After the transfer was complete, the screen returned to the DJI App Screen. I then restarted my Tablet.



I opened the DJI Fly App and tapped the Album Icon and the App Crashed, I restarted the App and tapped the Profile Icon and it again Crashed. I restarted the Tablet and opened the Fly App and tapped Connection Guide (opened normally), I then tapped Camera View and it opened, but the screen was missing various items, specifically: the Return Arrow (Upper Left), the Three Dots Menu (Upper Right), and the Map/Attitude Indicator (Bottom Left). I also inserted a photo of the MicroSD Card I am using…

Screen shot 3 ………………………….

I shut everything down, and rebooted the Tablet again, But it failed again, The Second Screen Shot shows the Flight Screen after I also powered up my Mini 2 (it was sitting on a filing cabinet in my office…)

All indicators indicate that I could take off and fly, but No Way…

Once again, I believe you gave Great Directions. I will Uninstall the Fly App and reinstall it, if all seems normal, I will again try your instructions and provide a follow-up posting either way.

PS: karlblessing in a later posting from yours warns about using "Slow" MicroSD Cards and mine certainly qualifies, perhaps that is the issue I am having…

 

[LoudThunder]

Bare in mind that if you move the entire app to the SD card you may suffer some performance/stability issues depending on both the quality of the SD card (which is a lot slower than internal memory) or the bus speed of the phone's interface to the card, especially if the app has a habit of saving a bunch of smaller log-like files.

I would say for best results, make sure the micro-SD is a U3/A2 type of card at the very least and not a U1/A1 (class-10), so that if your phone supports the higher speeds, it'll work better that way. (basically the same kind of card you'd need for any of the drones that save at 100Mbps or higher bit rate, as Class 10/U1 is only good for 80Mbps and below).

You warning may have come too late for me...

See:...

Can DJI FLY app save cached video to phone's SD card instead of main memory?

My android phone has very little main memory left, so if I let the DJI Fly app save cached video, then it saves the video files to the main memory of the phone and overflows it. But I have over 120GB of free space on the phones SD card slot. The android camera and other apps will save their...

mavicpilots.com

 

[karlblessing]

You warning may have come too late for me...

See:...

Can DJI FLY app save cached video to phone's SD card instead of main memory?

My android phone has very little main memory left, so if I let the DJI Fly app save cached video, then it saves the video files to the main memory of the phone and overflows it. But I have over 120GB of free space on the phones SD card slot. The android camera and other apps will save their...

mavicpilots.com

It also may not just be the card but could also be both the interface the device used only being intended for U1/C10 cards, or the android operating system used not having the expected file path compared to other Android versions (ie: on some devices it's simply a /external_sd root path, but on others it's something like /emulated/unique_id/ that DJI might not play nice with). Though I know the app is supposed to be good for Android 6.0 and up, there have been a lot of changes in how the external/SD storage is accessed from 6.0 to 12.0.

Ideally it would be nice if DJI can actually just code in a custom cache/image storage path and leave the rest internal. But I kind of doubt they'll bother seeing as a lot of newer flagship devices are ditching the sd slot such as Samsung has done since the S21.

The alternative would have been to format the SD card as "internal" storage which formats it as a Linux style ext4 partition instead of fat32/exfat, but that hasn't been an option in years for a lot of devices since it treats the slow card the same as internal which disrupt overall performance especially when the newer memory is much faster than most SD cards.

 

[LoudThunder]

The alternative would have been to format the SD card as "internal" storage which formats it as a Linux style ext4 partition instead of fat32/exfat, but that hasn't been an option in years for a lot of devices since it treats the slow card the same as internal which disrupt overall performance especially when the newer memory is much faster than most SD cards.

You know, I even wrote about this a while back when someone complained they did not have enough internal storage left to run the DJI Fly App.

Oh how it all comes flooding back now! I wrote that they needed to clean up their device, get rid of old Apps, download all their music, photos to the microSD Card to restore the Ram. Worse case I recommended that they save all their "stuff" to the MicroSD Card and do a complete Restore, even gave the detail instructions…

I also told them about formatting the Card as internal storage and even included the YouTube Video on how to do it… With all the warnings that once the change was made, the device would now operate at the slowest speed of any of the memory so I encouraged them to get the fastest card they could afford…

Any Case, I've reloaded the DJI App and it all seems to have returned to normal. You Know, I did a "Forced Stop" on the App before uninstalling and then I uninstalled the DJI Fly App and the Uninstall is about as "dirty" as the old Windows Uninstall was… About the only thing that I could verify as being removed was the DJI icon. It seemed that all the directories, subdirectories, and files were all still in internal storage, so I left them, rebooted the tablet and reinstalled the DJI Fly App. And all seems to be fine now.

I'm going to chalk it up to the slow MicroSD Card or the older Tablet I'm using, Android 6.0 and it cannot be upgraded further due to hardware issues. There are numerous entries following the instructions of successful transfers to external storage, so that proves they were Great Instructions.

I did not need to transfer my files to External storage using the system since I usually do this manually and it provides a good time to dump the "why did I photograph that?" photos…

Once again, You gave great warnings, I just got ahead of myself since I've wanted to do this for a while.

 

[karlblessing]

By the way. Some devices can be upgraded past their latest official os by going custom roms. For example a Motorola X4 officially can't go past 8.0 but I have it running Android 12 with LineageOS 19.1, likewise I have the same custom ROM running on a Samsung A7.

Edit : Seems like the latest you can get 'stable' on an S2 is LineageOS 17 (Android 10), and that's the unofficial build. [ROM][UNOFFICIAL][10] LineageOS 17.1 [T713][T719][T813][T819]

 

[LoudThunder]

Thank you for the link. I've saved it and I will seriously consider doing it, Really, the only frustrating issue is that Norton 360 stopped supporting anything less than Android 8.0. The only fear I really have now is that the Fly App will update and it turns out that DJI removed support for my old version of Android.