LG Joy Tips and Tricks

Android has an interesting new feature called Talkback which is designed for blind and low vision users.

The feature is an interesting way to navigate your phone however.

Simply go to Settings – Personal – Accessibility – Talkback to activate it.

Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.

Sometimes you will want to prevent your device fro, displaying or indexing folders on your Phone storage or USB storage.

To do this, simply rename the folder and place a . (full top / period) before the file or folder name.

This can be done through the Files App or by plugging your device in to your computer and renaming it there.

To share or upload a video to services like Facebook or YouTube, simply go to your Video App and long press on a video.

Then select Share via. From here you will be given options to share the video with various services.

Android cleverly uses Picasa to sync photos between your account and your phone. Sometimes however, this means that you will get duplicates appearing in your Gallery when they’re not actually on your phone.

To stop this from happening, and so you only see photos on the Phone or SD card, then follow these steps:

Drag down your notification menu from the top and click on the Gear icon to bring up your Settings. Then select Accounts and Google. Then select your Gmail account.

You should see a list of options that are ticked. Scroll down to the one that refers to Picasa and untick that.

Now that’s done we want to remove the thumbnails from your Gallery, so we need to refresh the Gallery. To do that, swipe down and go to Settings again. Then select More – Application Manager. Swipe across to show ALL Apps. Then find the Gallery App and press Clear Data.

This will erase the thumbnails in your Gallery, so don’t panic that your photos have disappeared. Just wait for the Gallery to re-build its index which could take awhile.

But the good news is that your Picasa Albums shouldn’t be there anymore.

If you want to install Apps outside of the Play Store (called sideloading), then go to Settings – Personal – Lock screen and security and select Unknown sources.

This setting will allow you to download Apps onto your device that would normally be blocked in the Play store.

Note: use at your own risk.

If you want to move a widget from one homescreen to another, simply press and hold on the widget. Then drag it to the edge of the screen. The next homescreen will appear. Then, just drag the item to where you would like.

You can speed up the page load speed on your browser by disabling JavaScript.

To do this, open your Browser, then press the Menu or More button and then Settings. Then select Advanced and change the Enable JavaScript
option.

Please note that this may affect the functionality of some sites.

To stop the Photo App or the Music player from indexing your files, place a blank text file called .nomedia in the folder containing your photos or music.

The best way to do this is to connect your device to a PC and then navigate to the relevant folder via your PC.

Android now has privacy or incognito mode built into the stock browser.

Open your Browser App and press the Tabs icon at the bottom. Then press the Menu or More button at the top. Then select New secret tab.

Another option is to use the popular Dolphin browser whenever you want to browse privately. Then each time you exit, Dolphin asks you whether you want to delete your Cache or History. If you select yes, then your activity will be untraceable. You may need to check this is enabled in the Dolphin settings.

If you want to go to settings, then you can go to your list of Apps and open the Settings App.

There is however a quicker way. Simply position your finger right at the top of the screen and drag it down. You may need to do this twice on some phones.

Your notification bar will appear and you can then press the small Gear icon at the top of the screen to go to the Settings.