When you connect a digital camera or Android smart phone to your Windows PC and try to copy pictures or videos that you shot using these devices to your PC, you may see a strange error that says – “The library, drive or media pool is empty”. After this error message appears on your screen, it disrupts the file copy operation and no more media files are copied to your PC. This error occrurs when Windows tries to copy a corrupt media file whether it is a picture or a video file from your digital camera or smart phone, when that device is connected over the MTP (media transfer protocol) or PTP (picture transfer protocol) connection to your PC.
There are two ways to resolve this problem – first involves skipping the corrupt file(s) and second method uses the USB Storage mode of the connected device:
Workaround 1:
- Try to copy all the files from your digital camera to a folder on your PC. Just select all the files or the DCIM folder on your device and copy-paste them in a folder on your PC.
- When the error occurs, do not click OK in the error message but wait and notice the name of the file in the file copy progress animation window. You should write it down, since the picture or videos names contain a lot of numbers and could be confusing. This is your corrupt file that is causing the problem.
- Look for this file name in the DCIM folder on your device and select all the files except this file. To do this use Ctrl+A to select all files, then hold Ctrl and click on the corrupt file to deselect it, followed by Ctrl+C to copy them to clipboard. Then paste them in a folder on your PC using the hotkey Ctrl+V to paste them.
- If you still see an error, the error would be due to another corrupt file. Repeat the steps 2 and 3 once again to avoid copying all the corrupt files. This should be done until all the corrupt files are identified and you no longer see any errors.
Workaround 2:
This error occurs because you are trying to copy files over the MTP or PTP connections. This is the usual connection for many of the digital camera and smart phone devices. But this protocol verifies the integrity of all the media files being copied – which means that all the corrupt media files shall cause an error and disrupt the file copying process.
A simple and permanent workaround is to change the settings in your digital camera or smart phone to avoid the MTP or PTP protocol based connections and instead choose the standard USB Storage connection. In the Android smart phones, you can swipe down the screen select USB Storage from the USB options for connection over the data cable. After this you won’t see any such “The library, drive or media pool is empty” errors even if the media files are slightly corrupt.
Summary: If you are seeing “The library, drive or media pool is empty” errors when copying pictures or videos from your digital camera, then the problem is a corrupt media file. You can easily resolve this problem either by avoiding the corrupt files or the MTP/PTP connections.