Camera freezing up phone- have to reboot

[john2777]

My phone use to work pretty good and I don't recall having problems with the camera.  Recently, my camera is freezing up the phone.  I thought it was because I was pressing the buttons too fast at first. So, if I give like 5-10 seconds between operations, then it seems to be better. But there are still problems.  I took some pictures I would like to email to a client regarding business and I have had my phone freeze 3 times and I have not even made it to the gallery to look at the photos.  Is this caused by the the latest OS update?  Also, I have tried to get into my photo gallery without going into the camera app, but I cannot find the icon on how to do this. I think there use to be an icon in the apps, but not now.  Can I get a Photo Gallery icon back into my app section?  HELP?

[ndragna]

Have you tried install a 3rd party camera app to see if it still freezes up? If it is smooth(ish) as butter that I can assume something with the native camera app is messing up. I'm sure your sick of people telling you to do a factory reset..but it really is the only option that people have that stick with a stock system. You can try clearing the cache partition in androids recovery first so you don't have to deal with installing all your apps/data, etc. If you do not know how to navigate there then let me know. Also, are you running kitkat?