Samsung Galaxy S3 Camera Failed Problem [How To Fix]

If you’ve received the message “Warning: Camera Failed” on your Samsung Galaxy S3, don’t panic because it’s a simple problem and it needs a simple solution. In fact, it is more of a software glitch than hardware. Basically, I will suggest you to try simpler troubleshooting steps first before going further to a more complicated one.

Fixing Camera Failure on Galaxy S3

There are, at least, three things you can do to try to fix this problem and let’s start from a very simple one:

Clear Camera Cache & Data

From the Home screen, press the Menu key.
From the options, tap Settings.
Find and tap Applications Manager.
Swipe twice to left to choose All tab.
Scroll to and tap Camera.
Tap Force Close button.
Tap Clear Cache button.
Tap Clear Data button. (Please note that all your settings and preferences will be deleted when you do this.)
Reboot your phone.
Check if the camera is now working.

Here’s the reason why you need to do this:

More often, camera failures are caused by corrupt cached data, which you need to clear. Tapping the Force Close button will stop the app from running. The Clear Cache button will delete all files used by the app when launched, while the Clear Data button will delete all settings including user’s preferences. This procedure will not affect other apps but the Camera app.

Clear Gallery Cache & Data

Follow the same procedure as the previous except that you need to find Gallery instead of Camera. This procedure will, basically, do the same thing to the app. But if you asked why you need to clear data from the Gallery app, well, it is because the Camera and Gallery apps work side-by-side. Thus, there is a connection between them. The fact is, many of camera-related problems are caused by the app.

The Camera app takes the photo but the Gallery app will manage those shots depending on the preferences of the user; it includes cropping thumbnails, sorting pictures by name (or date, or size, or whatever), uploading them to the cloud when syncing is enabled, etc. In short, the Gallery app has a lot of things to do than the Camera app. That’s why it is logical to clear its cache and data whenever the camera ceases to function normally.

Factory Reset

In case the problem couldn’t be resolved by doing the previous procedures, this is the next thing you should do if you can’t live with using your phone’s camera. But before anything else, we advise you to make a backup of everything important in your phone because they will be gone once this procedure is completed; that’s the hassling part when you decide to do this.

From the Home screen, tap the Menu button.
Choose Settings.
Tap on Accounts tab and choose Backup and Reset.
Tap Factory Data Reset.
Tap Reset Device.
Touch Delete All.

This procedure will delete all files, settings and data that is reachable by Android. However, there are certain folders or partitions in your phone’s memory that couldn’t be deleted by doing this. The best example is the cache partition.

Wipe Cache Partition

In case the problem isn’t resolved after the factory reset, try this procedure.

Turn the phone off.
Press and hold the Volume Up, Home and Power buttons until the phone vibrates.
Let go of the Power button but continue holding the Volume Up and Home buttons until Android System Recovery screen appears.
Press the Volume Down button to choose ‘wipe cache partition’.
Press the Power key to select.

What this does is empty contents of the cache partition. Every app has its own cache that is saved inside this partition. However, a factory reset cannot delete them that’s why you need to do this.

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