How to set up a gallery on Xiaomi: hidden functions and sorting

Modern Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO smartphones are equipped with powerful cameras that allow you to take hundreds of high-resolution pictures every day. However, without proper organization, this digital archive quickly turns into chaos, where you can not find the right shot. The standard application “Gallery” in the shells of MIUI and the new HyperOS has a wide range of functionality that often remains hidden from the user.

In this article, we will take a closer look at how to set up a gallery on shaomi for maximum convenience, using built-in sorting, hiding and cloud sync tools. You will learn how to manage landscape folders, configure automatic cleaning and use professional editors without installing third-party software.

The first thing that the owner of the new device faces is the standard kind of tape, where all the photos are mixed in chronological order. To view them comfortably, you need to master basic navigation principles. At the top of the screen, there are usually tabs "Photos", "Albums" and "Search", switching between which changes the logic of the content display.

The Photo tab is an infinite tape, sorted by date and time of shooting, and it's convenient to view events in their natural course. However, to structure the data, you better use the Album tab, where the system automatically groups the images by source: screenshots, videos, downloads from messengers and photos from the camera.

It's important to understand the difference between physically moving files and creating virtual shortcuts. When you drag a photo to a new album inside an app, the original often stays in the DCIM/Camera shared folder, and only a link is created in the album, which saves space but can be confusing when you try to delete the file.

⚠️ Note: Deleting the photo from the All Photos album will result in it disappearing from all user albums where it was added, as the original file itself is deleted.

To navigate quickly through years and months, use a two-finger swipe gesture, and if you spread your fingers across the screen, the scale will decrease, and you can quickly move back several years, which is especially useful when looking for old shots in a huge dataset.

One of the most sought-after features in the Xiaomi ecosystem is the ability to steal from prying eyes, not just removing from view, but putting files in a secure container that requires a password or fingerprint to access, and you need to do a few simple things to activate this mode.

Go to the gallery settings through a three-dot menu or a gear in the corner of the screen. Find Hide Albums and activate the switch. Then, in the album viewing mode (not individual photos), you pull the list down until the lock icon appears. The system will ask you to set a password or use biometrics.

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Use different passwords to lock the screen and the hidden album to increase the privacy of your data.

Once you set up a hidden album, it's intuitive to move files there. Select the images you want, click on "More" and select "Hide" and the photos disappear from public access and are only accessible through a special gallery entrance.

It is worth noting that hidden albums do not sync with the Mi Cloud in standard mode unless a special cloud encryption option is enabled, which means that if you lose your phone, the data in the hidden album can be lost forever if you do not back up manually.

• 🔒 Hidden Album Protects Files Even When Connecting Your Phone to Your Computer USB-cable.
• 📸 Video files also support the concealment function and are only played inside the protected area.
• 🔄 When resetting your phone to factory hidden files are deleted without the possibility of recovery.

The order of displaying photos can be critical for those who keep a visual diary or portfolio. By default, the gallery sorts files by date of creation, but sometimes metadata can get lost or reversed. In new versions of HyperOS, sorting algorithms have become smarter, but manual adjustment is still available.

Inside a particular album (like "Camera"), click on the control menu and select "Sort." There are options available: by shooting date, by adding date, by file name or by size. Sorting by file name is useful if you manually renamed the images by assigning them serial numbers.

If photos from different sources (such as WhatsApp and Telegram) are mixed, you can change the settings for displaying media content. The gallery settings have an item called "Manage Album Display," where you can forcibly hide system folders like.thumbnails or temp, which sometimes pop up in the shared list.

For advanced users, sorting is available inside Search mode. Xiaomi's AI analyzes the content of the images and allows them to be filtered into categories: People, Places, Things. This doesn't change the physical location of the files, but creates dynamic samples.

Cloud sync is a key element of the Mi ecosystem, allowing not only backups but also free up space on the device, and Clear Memory removes photos from the phone that have already been successfully uploaded to the Mi Cloud.

To set up sync, go to Settings → Mi Account → Mi Cloud → Gallery. Activate the Mi Cloud Sync switch. After you first upload all your photos, you can turn on the Free Space feature. The system will analyze the files and prompt you to delete local copies, leaving them only in the cloud.

It is important to note that when synced, removing a photo on one device will automatically remove it from all other gadgets associated with this Mi Account, which protects against duplicate debris, but requires care.

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Always check the status of the cloud upload before manually cleaning the phone’s memory so you don’t lose important footage irretrievably.

Xiaomi's built-in gallery editor offers tools that are often underrated: it allows you to retouch, apply filters, change perspective, and even use AI to improve the quality of old shots. The editor is accessed when you view any photo through the Edit button.

One of the most powerful features is the "Edit Magic" or AI Enhance. The algorithm automatically determines the type of scene (portrait, landscape, document) and applies optimal contrast, saturation and sharpness settings. There is a special mode for documents that aligns the sheet and removes shadows.

Also available is the Lastick feature, which allows you to remove extra objects from a photo, and although it doesn't work as well as the Google Pixel, it's quite enough to remove minor defects or passers-by in the background, and it works on neural networks, filling a remote area with a suitable texture background.

• 🎨 Filters can be applied selectively, using a mask to leave part of the original photo.
• ✂️ The function "Copy Style" allows you to copy color correction from one photo and apply to another.
• 📝 Adding text and stickers is supported with a variety of fonts and animations.

⚠️ Note: When you save the edited photo, the original is saved separately. To overwrite the original, you need to select the appropriate option when saving, otherwise the memory will fill with copies.

If the standard gallery interface seems overloaded or slow, there is a possibility of using third-party solutions. However, replacing the system gallery with Xiaomi has its own peculiarities due to the deep integration of the application into the system.

You can install Google Photos, Simple Gallery or AGallery. To assign them to the default, when you open a link to an image, the system may ask how to open the file. But to open the application by icon on the desktop you will either have to create a shortcut to the new gallery or disable the system (which is not recommended, since previews in other applications may stop working).

Often users wonder where exactly the photos are saved and how to find them through the file manager.The path to the main camera album is always standard: internal memory, the DCIM folder, then the Camera folder. Screenshots are usually in the Pictures/Screenshots or DCIM/Screenshots folder.

Images uploaded from the Internet are most often found in the Download or Pictures folder. Understanding the structure of the Android file system helps you find the right files faster when the gallery for some reason does not display new pictures (for example, when indexing fails).

Sometimes the gallery may not work properly, like downloading previews, hanging up or seeing new photos, most often the problem lies in a crowded cache of sketches or the presence of a.nomedia marker file in the folders of the photo, which prevents the system from scanning this directory.

To solve the problem, go to Settings → Apps → All Apps → Gallery. Select Clear → Clear Cache. Don’t confuse Clear Data with Clear Data, as this can reset album settings, even though the photos themselves will remain in place.

If the problem is that the gallery is showing deleted photos or “phantom” images, try restarting the media server process, which can be done by restarting the phone or by forcibly stopping the Mediaserver process in the developer settings, if such an option is available in your version of MIUI.

Competently customizing the gallery on Xiaomi turns chaotic image storage into an orderly archive. Using hidden albums, cloud sync and built-in editing tools, you can dramatically improve your media content efficiency. Check your sorting settings regularly and make room for the device to work quickly.