Android: Extreme Battery Drain by MediaServer

The Media Server or also the Media Scanner is responsible to scan and index all of your media (for example images or videos) so that they can be displayed in your gallery or other apps.

Sometimes the program gets stuck or it hangs at specific files, both leading to a very huge battery consumption. Also if you have very much pictures or videos on your smartphone or if you have very much media in a single folder (typically for WhatsApp images becoming more and more over the years), the MediaServer application can get the mentioned problems. Even the usage of old SD cards can increase the problem.

Well, what can you do now? Here are some ideas:

• Media Server Reset: Sometimes it helps to just reset the database of the MediaServer or MediaScanner. For doing that, you can go to the Settings > Apps > Media Storage and click on "Clear Data" and "Force Stop". After that, restart your mobile phone. Sometimes that is enough.
• Delete Media: The more pictures and images you have stored on your phone, the more the Media Server has to do. So, it is better to backup the data more often and to throw the unneeded images from your phone. More than 1000 files per folder are seldom a good idea.
• Delete Thumbnails: The MediaServer creates small preview images of all media files. If too much of them have accumulated over the time, this can lead to problems. Therefore, it can help to delete the contents of the folder "/sdcard/DCIM/.thumbnails", so that your phone is forced to create new thumbnails. The same applies also for the corresponding folder on your memory card.
• Find damaged Files: Possibly a corrupted file is blaming the misery. In this case, you should try to find the file and you should delete it.
• Format Memory Card: Maybe your memory card is damaged or has other problems. In this case formatting the card could help (of course only after a backup).

I recommend trying the ideas beginning from the top of this list after each other. When I was faced with this problem, in most cases, the simple reset was sufficient to get rid of it.
2016-09-28 at 22:55