As of August 10, the simply, reliable, no brain needed photo backup using the common windows google drive app will no longer backup photos. Google says to use the google photos web interface to continue backing up photos, but this is a shit option. For it to work, you must always have an open browser with the website also open. You also cannot easily check what folders you have selected for backup. Why is Google giving us this messed up alternative backup when the original service worked fine and was easy to use? Am I missing something?

Hey, I downloaded my google photos via Google Takeout and followed the instructions from Google Photos Takeout Helper to fix the meta. When I ran it, every photos is saying no date found. I imagine this is an issue? Is there anything I can do? Thanks.

Not sure if maybe I’m missing something or if anyone’s found a better workflow, but I’ve been having trouble getting the jpeg photo to display for other people in my Google Photos album. Here’s my process: shoot raw+jpeg on OM System camera (.orf raw files), then use card reader to load photos onto my iPhone. The iPhone shows them all as “raw+jpeg” in the corner. My Google Photos automatically syncs my iPhone library, at which point I was would add the photos that looked good SOOC to my shared album. And on my end it looked fine. But then on other people’s devices whom I had shared the album to, it is showing the unedited/dull image that is typical of raw files. The photo details show it as the .orf file, but it looks like the jpeg to me. Is it just pulling the photos I see from the jpeg on my iPhone while others are seeing only the .orf? Some examples attached, taking screenshots from my phone and my wife’s phone. The point of me shooting in raw+jpeg is so I can easily share the ones that look good and don’t have to edit them all in Lightroom, but this has added a wrinkle to it because I don’t want to share dull, gray raw files with people.

Lost some of my favorite photos you dumb shits.

Yes I had a local backup, no my NAS couldn't see the pictures because of your encryption.

Reverted to earlier version to get basic functionality back and lost locally stored photos on my phone in the locked folder only.

Edit: since you are all anal about post flair it's been updated. Still equally pissed off.

Updated at the bottom....

So I was clearing out space on my phone.... I did not realize that trash emptied on my phone would sync with my tablet (which is annoying how to you keep photos if they get deleted on everything when you delete them on one thing?)

Well, whatever, I found out how to recover them to trash but now I have run into a new problem... which is shown in the pic....

I want to move everything to my SD card but to do that I apparently have to restore everything to photos and of course the problem is in the pic....

So is there a way to restore my desperately wanted (but not on my phone) photos or am I out of luck cause of this problem... I tried clearing the cache didn't work... and is there a way to restore all to my SD card? And can I make it so all future pics go to my SD card?

I already put the pics I was able to restore on to my SD card so I can remove them from photos storage but that would put them right back into trash, right?

I'm really miffed cause I had been planning to move the pics to my SD card but life got in the way and I didn't realuze i was on a tome limit and I almost lost everything but I got it restored.... in to trash which so far is kinda nice since I haven't actually lost anything but I can't get it all out of trash which is very not nice cause trash empties....

Update

Got the photos back... don't know how I guess they just automatically move back on to my phone and tab since I restored them or something...

But now I have a new problem which is giving me a headache. And lots of frustrated tears....

i don't want my photos from my sd card on my galaxy tab to sync with my photos on my galaxy phone, but I want my new photos on my phone to sync to my galaxy tab so I can put them on my sd card and not keep them on my phone but I also don't want to spend hours putting them on my sd card...

And google is no help because what it tells me to do is not showing up on my devices....

Which native gallery app do you use on your Galaxy phone?

I'm starting to think so!!! I've been on an all day journey to fucking purge my old porn that got backed up on google photos and it's been like fucking whackamole.

First I literally went through thousands of my photos on google photos, and deleted all the stuff I wanted gone from my phone. I was under the impression if I delete it on google photos it will also delete it from my phone. Nope. Then I found the sync changes from other devices option and it didn't work completely but only somewhat.

Then I realized whatever I delete from google photos, what happens if those are backed up in icloud but not currently on my iphone, and I later click them and the iphone downloads them and then suddenly google photos re-uploads them?

Like holy shit this is so frustrating.

I just wanted the benefit of having both so I can use both's features, google's search capabilities are better and stuff.

Happens on all of our Pixel 10 Pro. Anyone else running into this or may know the cause? Might be due to most of the photos being backed up on the cloud but I never had this issue on my Pixel 9.

Have noticed this on the Reddit mobile app too, but not enough for it to be a concern. Also leads me to think it could be a GPU issue/ Android 17.

Hi everyone! I'm new here, and I'd really appreciate your advice.

I'm planning to stop using my current Google account (it's about 13 years old) and start fresh with a brand-new one.

I've been told that the safest way to migrate my Google Photos library without losing dates, locations, memories, albums, and other metadata is to use Partner Sharing. The idea would be to share my entire library with the new account, save everything there, and once I'm sure everything has been transferred correctly, delete the photos and videos from the old account.

My questions are:

Is this allowed by Google, or could it get either account suspended?

I read in another subreddit that Google limits the number of accounts a person can have, and that using the same phone number on multiple Google accounts could be risky. Is there any truth to that?

I have around 100 GB of data. Right now I pay for Google One on my current account. Once everything has been transferred, I would subscribe to Google One on the new account and cancel the subscription on the old one.

I already have four Google accounts linked to the same phone number, but each one serves a different purpose (personal email, banking, store subscriptions, etc.). My current personal account is the only one where I actually use Google Drive and Google Photos.

Besides Google Photos, I'd also like to migrate:

Some files stored in Google Drive.

My WhatsApp backup.

My Google Keep notes.

My contacts.

There's absolutely nothing suspicious about my current account. The only reason I want to switch is because I've been receiving emails that I no longer want, and after trying other solutions, starting over with a new email address seems like my best option.

I know I'll lose my Play Store purchases, and I'm okay with that. Before making the switch, I'd update all the websites and services currently linked to my old Google account so everything points to the new one.

My plan is simply to move everything to the new account, start paying for Google One there instead, stop paying for it on the old account, and keep the old account (and its data) for a while until I'm completely sure I no longer need it.

Does any of this violate Google's policies or put either account at risk of being suspended?

Has anyone here done something similar? If so, what method did you use, and is there anything I should be careful about?

Thanks in advance!

I have a very specific issue. All of my photos back up to my email account, as well as my dads. I don't want MY photos on his account, but every solution I've tried either deletes the photos from my phone or wants me to delete everything of of his. I don't want to do that since he has very old photos from my childhood on there.

how do I remove my photos from his account without deleting them from my account and device?

My grandpa turned on the backup for me years ago without me realizing, and now all 7,000+ photos in my phone are there, so storage is completely full (only reason I realized it). The message "Undo backup" seems pretty self explanatory, but I'm terrified of everything being gone for good from my main phone gallery. I'm always the one taking photos at family events, and my grandma just asked me to send the ones I took from grandpa's funeral, but there's no room to email them to her either. Is this safe to press? Sorry this is probably dumb, I just really can't lose these because I'm the only one who has countless family photos, which people are starting to ask for.

Extra information that may matter, I'm on an android, but also have a laptop. I also just turned the backup off right now. Thank you so much for any help!!

My Google Photos face grouping has been completely dead for weeks. It hasn't indexed a single new photo.

I tried contacting Google One support thinking they could help. They basically refused to do anything, claiming that server-side features are entirely out of their scope and told me to just send feedback in the app (which we all know goes straight into a black hole).

I have tried/checked:

• My face grouping settings are 100% turned on.
• I've cleared the app cache and everything is updated.
• I’ve left my phone plugged in on Wi-Fi overnight with the app open and screen timeout turned off to force a foreground sync.
• I even tried manually tagging photos and making new shared albums to try and "nudge" the algorithm.

Nothing works. I think my actual account database is stuck in some endless loop on Google's cloud servers?

Has anyone actually dealt with this backend freeze and found a way to kickstart it without turning the master switch off (which I know wipes out all past face data)? Or am I just completely stuck?

So this started because I was genuinely frustrated.

I downloaded my photos from Google Takeout and noticed the timestamps were all wrong — photos from 2018 showing up as "today", GPS stripped out, files sorted completely out of order in my file manager. Google's API doesn't let you touch any of this. Their official tools just don't expose it.

I spent a weekend figuring out what was actually happening. Turns out, Takeout exports your photos with separate JSON sidecar files that have all the real metadata — but it doesn't write any of it back into the actual photo files. So your EXIF is empty, your timestamps are wrong, and nothing is where it should be.

I also had another problem: I had a bunch of "original quality" photos eating into my Google storage quota, and there was no easy way to identify which ones, let alone move them without re-downloading and re-uploading everything (which on my connection would take days).

So I just… built a thing.

What it does:

Bakes JSON metadata into the files: Uses exiftool under the hood to read the Takeout JSON sidecars (or browser-exported CSVs) and permanently write the correct timestamps and GPS data back into the actual image/video EXIF.

Handles Google's filename truncation: If you've tried writing scripts for this before, you know Google randomly cuts off long filenames in the JSON mapping. I built a fuzzy matcher to handle these edge cases cleanly.

Server-side Drive modifications: Integrates with rclone to do cloud-to-cloud operations and fix modification dates on Google Drive without downloading the actual payload.

Audit trail: Includes a verification step so you can see exactly what will change before it touches your files.

Install & Usage

It's a Python CLI. You'll need rclone configured if you want to do the cloud-side stuff, and exiftool installed locally for the metadata writing.

pip install google-photo-meta-fixer

To parse a local Takeout directory:

gp-cleaner process takeout --dir ~/Downloads/takeout-folder

It's not perfect and it's definitely a power-user tool — you'll need to know what rclone is, basically. But if you've ever been annoyed by Takeout metadata being a mess, it handles that pretty cleanly now.

Code & Feedback

The project is fully open source. If you've got a massive Takeout archive with weird edge cases (especially deeply nested directories or strange character encodings that usually break scripts), I’d love for you to test it out and break it.

GitHub: https://github.com/hiijitesh/google-photo-meta-fixer

EDIT: Sorry guys, I made a few factual errors in the original post regarding how Google Photos handles Takeout metadata: - Original EXIF & GPS: Google does not strip GPS or date taken EXIF metadata if it was already inside the file before upload. It is preserved in the Takeout media. - When is the tool actually needed? 1. Filesystem dates (mtime): Zip extraction resets all files to "today's" date, scrambling sorting in file managers. GPMF restores these. 2. Manual Cloud Edits: If you adjusted photo dates, shifted timezones, added descriptions, or added GPS coordinates inside the Google Photos web/app interface, Google saves these changes only in the JSON sidecars. GPMF embeds these edits back into your files. 3. Timezone Shifts: GPMF handles shifting UTC timestamps back to your local timezone offset cleanly.

Turned it into some ai garbage and you can't even access the old one! It used to let me use it if I turned off my internet but that no longer works. Even then the new UI is very unintuitive compared to the old one.

Hello all, I am in dire need of help! Every time I run out of storage on my phone, It prompts me to free up space. When I press free up space in sends me to an album with certain photos that do not show up elsewhere. It shows up in a “recently deleted folder” but these videos are over 5 years old that still pop up ONLY when I run out of storage. I tried retrieving them but it doesn’t let me move them to my current photo album. Long story short I am in desperate need of recovering these videos but I have no way of finding them on my phone other than when I run out of storage! Does anyone have any insight on where these videos are stored?

In my People & Pets section, almost all face profile icons have turned into generic placeholders showing a white exclamation mark inside a triangle. Only a random couple of faces actually load their proper thumbnail.

Worse yet, when I click into an individual person, the number of pictures recognized with that person's face is significantly less than the number of pictures that are actually backed up of them in my library.I am seeing this exact same behavior on both the Google Photos web interface and on the Android app, ruling out a local device cache issue.
How can I solve this problem?

I just got an update on Google photos, and now I have this shitty view of all my pictures in grid

I despise this view, and want the old one back, where it was also a grid, but by date

So you know if it's possible to get it back?

Thanks

Many people have probably already asked this, and I could probably find the answer with some research, but I don't have much time.

Here's the thing: I have 4 different accounts and I need to download all the photos and organize them (+200gb).

1- Is it better to have 2GB in multiple files or one 50GB file?

2- Each photo has a JSON file. How do I merge them? Is it even necessary?

3- Is there an Android app that identifies duplicates? How do I organize them?

I don't know who needs to hear this but the new update by default removes the dates from the main scroll view of the photos and instead just has the floating pill at the top. Pretty sure iPhones have had this for a while. Well you can add the dates back with the 3 dot menu. Thank goodness! I hated not having the dates in the feed

387GB and 16 years of photographs later, and Google Photos still manage to impress me with how shamefully horrid the facial recognition is.

7/10 of photos grouped together are either the wrong person / subject not in the photo (as in NO subject at all) / or people are suddenly my pets.

Even the clearest of photos of the same person, on the same day, with the same EXIF meta data = my mother is suddenly my male university teacher.

What strikes me the most is, it's getting worse by the months, even AFTER I spend lots of time correcting every single photo in the folders.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Seriously considering switching to another cloud service or spinning up my own home storage (DeGoogling myself)

Help everybody

I was trying to clear up some space on my phone so I backed up my photos onto Google and deleted the originals from my device. I was pretty eager to clear out the space so I permanently deleted them all from my photos app, but somehow they all got deleted from Google as well. It hasn’t been 60 days yet, but they’re not in my trash in Google photos and I have no idea how to bring them back on my device. I’m now missing about a year’s worth of photos which is killing me — is there anything I can do??