r/googlephotos 4h ago

Troubleshooting ⚠️ The AI feature keeps automatically turning on and then blocking me from searching through my own material for breast cancer research

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7 Upvotes

I keep turning off the AI feature to no avail. It does give me the option to manually press “skip,” but this also doesn’t seem to work properly, as it will say I don’t have any photos that match the term, which wasn’t an issue a month ago. These aren’t even photos of breasts that could get flagged as inappropriate; they’re just terms like “lobular cell carcinoma” etc. I can search for the same terms fine on my iPhone photo app. I downloaded Google Photos in the first place because it used to have a much better search tool. There is no parental control etc turned on in settings.

What happened to being able to simply search for a photo? I used to be able to easily find screenshots of important data and slide images I saved on my own phone. Why would any feature exist that blocks us from accessing our own photos? No matter how I try to word it, the app keeps telling me that I can’t search medical terms or that need to talk to a doctor (I am a doctor).

Edit: fixed a sentence


r/googlephotos 6h ago

Troubleshooting ⚠️ I can no longer search for photos by date

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4 Upvotes

I have saved photos from when my child was a baby in Google photos. I've always been able to search by date, for example "July 2016," but now when I do that it says I can't search using those terms. I don't see any option to disable the AI search feature. I'm going to have to migrate all of my photos to a different platform if this keeps up, there's no point in storing photos if I can't search for them without AI.


r/googlephotos 2h ago

Question 🤔 Help me unsync my device from google photos

2 Upvotes

My phone's gallery is synced with google photos, but I have so many photos that I need to buy storage space soon. I never use google photos, and I'm not planning to pay google for more storage anytime soon, and I have already accidentally deleted 2k photos to save soace unknowingly. Please help me unsync my gallery from google photos. Thanks in advance.


r/googlephotos 3h ago

Question 🤔 Google photos mod (NOT for unlimited backup)

1 Upvotes

Has the community ever created a Google Photos mod that is not exclusively about unlocking the original and unlimited upload and proposes to improve the user experience?

I've been paying for a storage plan for years but the quality (of the Google ecosystem, in general) has slowly gone down, I would like to see new functions or old functions return such as being able to change video thumbnails without having to enter the entire editing interface, more search filters, automatic conversion of unsupported formats, advanced grouping, batch metadata editing, etc. I KNOW there Is software that can do this, but why not?


r/googlephotos 8h ago

Troubleshooting ⚠️ Transfer from google drive to laptop

2 Upvotes

I have 800+ photos that I want to put in a folder on my laptop, from google drive.

I tried highlighting all the photos hoping to be able to cut/copy and paste but it didn't work.

I've tried using google take out before, I'm not really technically minded so had problems with this.

Is there a simple copy and paste way?


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Are the Photos on Google Photos scanned by Google like the files of Google Drive . I know if you put some stuff on Google Drive . Google sees it and I have seen people accounts get banned online . Is Google Photos same ?

22 Upvotes

I don't really put my very Private stuff on Google Drive for that reason but I keep backup of all my photos on Google Photos and I realized I also sometimes make backups of important documents and I am not sure anymore if it is even safe to do that


r/googlephotos 17h ago

Question 🤔 Photos not recognizing people in photos saved from shared album

1 Upvotes

I have a big shared album (1755 photos) that I saved to my account, saved it approx 2 weeks ago.
For some reason photos doesn’t recognize the people in photos saved from it. How can I make it identify?


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Deleting photos from google photos deletes it from Device. How to prevent that.

12 Upvotes

Hello guys. I am in a very tough situation. I ran out of my storage in google photos and now i want to delete them but the problem is that whenever i delete them from google photos, it automatically delete the photos from the device storage aswell. I already lost multiple photos permanently with no way of getting them back . I am honestly very fckin scared.

What can i do now ? .


r/googlephotos 19h ago

Question 🤔 Gallery Problems?

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1 Upvotes

r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Google Photos shared album taking up too much space. How can I stop auto-saving, and how to delete photos from my account while leaving them in the shared album?

2 Upvotes

Title, basically. A quick google search seems to be outdated since I cannot find anywhere to stop the shared album from auto-saving photos I upload. I've seen similar posts on reddit too but the answers also seem outdated.

My account storage is now almost full and I don't know how to clear up space without deleting everything from the shared album as well, AND how to stop auto-saving everything I share.

Can anyone help me with this?


r/googlephotos 20h ago

Question 🤔 I have a serious problem with Google Photos, it duplicated some photos

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2 Upvotes

i noticed Google Photos duplicated many of my old photos from 2025 and before, I get the original and a compressed one. I never asked for that (it takes the size of the original + the (a little smaller) size of the duplicate

Why this bullshit is happening and what should I do ? I’m not spending hours to delete duplicated photos one by one (after checking which one is the duplicate, which already takes time)


r/googlephotos 16h ago

News 📰 Well....

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0 Upvotes

i understand that low effort posts are against the rules but im hoping an exception can be made. These are the new permissions added in this new version.


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Google Photos erratic behaviors

2 Upvotes

The latest Google Photos is driving me nuts!

All the photos are together without being separated by dates...but if I back out and go to Collections>Camera 3 to 4 times in a row suddenly it will be separated by dates.

and the three dots to set preferences comes and goes, sometimes it shows up during scrolling sometimes not. Is this some secret sequences to make it appear consistently?

I don't get Google, do they sit around every day to think of user interface devolvement options to confuse the end users?


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Bug 🐞 The new Google Photos layout completely broke my photo timeline

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0 Upvotes

Before the latest update, whenever I opened the Google Photos app, all of my photos were there, whether they had been backed up or not. I could scroll through more than 10 years of photos in one continuous timeline.

Now, the app is basically empty. The only photos that show up are the new ones I take with my phone’s camera.

All of my older photos are still there when I open Google Photos on the web, so nothing seems to have been deleted. They just no longer appear in the app’s main timeline.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Is this an intentional change, a bug, or some setting I’m missing?


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Changed setting link from phone to Google Photos

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0 Upvotes

I recently got a new iPhone and now for some reason lost access to a workflow I used to heavily rely on between my camera roll and Google Photos.

Essentially, I recently went on vacation and throughout the weekend, I made sure to back up my photos to Google Photos multiple times a day because I’m always anxious about losing or breaking my phone while I’m out. I usually do this in my every day life too before I have the time to really go through to delete any bad photos (blinking, duplicates, blurry, etc.).

Since getting back from vacation, I have slowly went through and deleted all of the bad ones from my camera roll.

Typically, what I have always done after this is go back into Google Photos, select an entire day, press “delete,” and a prompt comes up that asks for permission to delete the photos, only deleting the “bad” ones I had already deleted from my camera roll and leaving all the “good photos” so that the bad photos from both my camera roll and Google Photos were gone completely, but the good ones were backed up in both places.

When I tried to do this today, it deleted ALL of the photos from my Google Photos back up from that day and moved them to my recently deleted in my camera roll. I was able to move them back from my recently deleted to my camera roll, but they now won’t re-sync to my Google Photos.

Is this a setting I changed? Or an update I missed? I used to rely heavily on this workflow to prevent the space on my Google Photos from getting clogged up with bad and useless photos and keeping all of the good ones in both places.

I’m including a screenshot from ChatGPT to explain this workflow more clearly because I was having a really hard time explaining it to my friends for assistance.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Duplicate photos appearing much later

2 Upvotes

I've been experiencing a situation recently where I take a photo, crop and save it (NOT save as copy) and then 24 hours or more later a duplicate version of the edited image turns up out of the blue. This duplicate version is much smaller than the original, and there's no Revert option if I try to edit it, exactly as if I had actually saved it as a copy.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour before? It's getting quite annoying.


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Duplicate images reoccuring

1 Upvotes

Hi all,

Weird thing has been happening for a few months now. Varies in time, anything from once a day, to a week to a fortnite my images and videos will automatically duplicate.

So I go into cleanup, delete all duplicate images and videos and empty my recently deleted, then the cycle repeats over and over.

Any ideas why that is? Is it an honour thing? An android thing? Or a Google thing?

Anyone had similar issues and fixed it?

EDIT: Just to say this doesn't happen to all of my images and videos, it's a few hundred of the same images and videos every time.


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Why is my fb profile pictures always always blurry

0 Upvotes

Help please


r/googlephotos 2d ago

Bug 🐞 Google photos is now a sync service rather than backup option

99 Upvotes

I had my backup everything feature turned on and naturally everything got backed up. I reached my full storage of 100gb. I now wanted to delete some photos from ONLY the Google photos cloud and not my local.

I went to photos.google.com because deleting them from my phone would mean deleting them from my local too which I did not want I wanted to just clear space in the cloud for more important photos and videos.

I deleted them on the photos.google.com site and came back to my phone to my surprise that they had been deleted from my local too.

I know Google is a business trying to make money but like this? Where I cannot even choose what I want on my local device? This is such a shitty thing Google has done. Absolutely hideous.

I turned my always backup off so now I can choose to backup what I want rather than not being able to choose after it got backed up.

Such a disappointment by Google. I was always a person who loved Google and their products and services but I feel betrayed right now


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 anyone else's phone storage just permanently full? 😭

0 Upvotes

I deleted 3 GB of photos yesterday.

Somehow my phone still says...

Storage Almost Full.

At this point i'm convinced it just enjoys stressing me out 😂

How many photos do you have in your gallery right now?


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Bug 🐞 Google photos http error 400?

1 Upvotes

I have been trying to download some videos and images from my Google photos account all day and I keep getting http error 400. Does anyone know what's happening or how to fix this?

Edit: whatever the issue was, 6 hours later and it seems to be fixed.


r/googlephotos 1d ago

Question 🤔 Can I recover my photos?

0 Upvotes

Hi. Today, when I was selling my computer, I hastily deleted the photos from the hard drive.I did it on impulse and wasn't aware of what I was doing. It contained photos that were 5 or 10 years old. This contained my family's memories and photographs.I downloaded these photos from my Google account about a month ago using the "takeout" function and saved them to disk. After that, I deleted it from Google Photos and emptied the trash bin as well.Is there any way I can recover the files? I'm so upset about doing this; are all those memories just wasted? Could contacting support resolve this issue? Thanks for your answers...


r/googlephotos 2d ago

Question 🤔 Switching Google emails

1 Upvotes

This has become so convoluted I will do my best to explain this in a logical manner..
My original Google email got completely overrun with spam and after a long period of trying to stop, it decided to just change everything to a different Gmail. Well trying to copy my photos using partner sharing to the new Google. Email is the last set of steps that I did that didn’t work..
I first tried using Google takeout but ended up screwing up the time, date and location on several of the images due to the .json files.
So then decided to try to partner share from the original email to the new email..
For a little extra context, I’m using an iPhone 17e this all started when I tried to do this after upgrading from my iPhone 12, which I still have and still has most of the original images some of the dates got screwed up on it too.. also I do not have access to a PC…
So trying to do this on mobile on one device and not sure if that’s the issue I’m running into after partner sharing. It appears that all the images are there but as far as for the storage space, it is not reflecting that and I’ve given it several days to process and update the amount of Storage being used… when trying to switch the back up to the new email it backs up from both emails to that one or vice versa to the old one. I can’t get them to separate for some reason I’ve tried removing the old email from the device and it didn’t seem to change anything, but maybe I didn’t remove it everywhere or missed something. I’m not sure any help would be greatly appreciated. I’ve been trying to do this for almost a month now using ChatGPT and Gemini and still completely stuck.
Thank you immensely in advance for any help!!!


r/googlephotos 2d ago

Question 🤔 Question about Backup

0 Upvotes

Hi guys, I'm full on my phone space, so I'd like to delete some images ONLY from the device. My question is: Deleting a device folder that backups on Google photos will delete also these GPhotos images? And if world like this... what should I do to keep selected folders only on cloud but bot on my device?


r/googlephotos 2d ago

Question 🤔 Rearranging my uploads problem

0 Upvotes

Does anyone else have issues with organising their pics on their boards and sections? I spent over an hour putting each picture in its place yesterday, and I just checked and they haven't updated!