Forcing a media refresh on Android with adb

Android will automatically perform a media refresh when an SD card is mounted.

Using adb, we can fake that event by manually sending a MEDIA_MOUNTED intent.

For example, if you wanted to run a media refresh of the entire SD card:

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adb -d shell "am broadcast -a android.intent.action.MEDIA_MOUNTED -d file:///sdcard"

To refresh different directory, just change "/sdcard" to the absolute path of the directory you want to refresh.

For more fine-grained control, use the MEDIA_SCANNER_SCAN_FILE intent, which triggers a rescan of a single file.