Fixing “The library, drive or media pool is empty” Error

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.

The library, drive or media pool is empty

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:

  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.
  2. 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.The library, drive or media pool is empty
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

The library, drive or media pool is empty

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.

11 comments

  1. This was helpful but the problem with my situation is with my iPhone, i videoed it myself, some of the clips got copied but the bigger clips get this error. It would be extremely helpful if you had a solution for this!

  2. I have a Sony Experia E5 and seem to get many corrupted photo files when transferring from the internal storage to the SD card. Then the “The library drive or media pool is empty” message when I try to copy using the MTP protocol to my computer running windows 10. I have one important photo which shows OK on the phone OK and is saved on the SD card and many others which I cannot now view at all. The files are not empty 2-3MB and were OK before I tried to transfer to the SD card. This arises because it does not seem to be possible to have photos and videos saving directly to the SD card and the internal transfer process takes a very long time. If terminated early the files get corrupted. only half photo visible etc. Can I recover that one photo? Is there a way to always save photos and videos to the SDcard

    1. Looks like your SD card is failing. There is nothing you can do about files on such a dying card – the data is gone and cannot be recovered. Quickly replace your SD card with a new SD card. Buy a Class 10 SD card from SanDisk or Samsung for reliable performance.

  3. i need too recover that corrupted file not skip it … it is a 36K txt file containing 2 weeks of blogging critical data and it got corrupted from a failing battery shutting down th phone after an edit to the file using Jota.

  4. If you have this on android phone is easier to compress the folder to a zip file and then move the file. It worked for me.

  5. Had the problem “The library drive or media pool is empty”. Used your determination that it wa a corrupted file on my wife’s Android phone. Followed your instruction on how to identify the file. Removed the file and downloaded all remaining photos to a Western Digital HD without further incident.

    Thanks so much for a great solution.

Comments are closed.