Have you ever wondered if some of the photos in your Google Photos account have been corrupted? If so, you may want to know that Google just released an update to their service which corrupts old photos stored on its servers – as many as 9 million users are said to have been affected by this bug. Here’s what happened and how to make sure you don’t lose any of your photos in the future. Don’t Look Now, But Google Photos May Be Corrupting Your Old Photos
Affected users report losing hundreds of photos
Table of Contents
GOOGLE PHOTOS IS CORRUPTING YOUR OLD PHOTOS. Hundreds of users who uploaded their photos to the service are reporting that many of their old images have been replaced with corrupted versions. This has happened for everyone from amateurs to professionals and has been going on for months.
How did it happen?
The bug appears to be caused by a change made in the Photo app’s handling of duplicate copies of photos and videos. When a user syncs photos or videos with the Google Photos service, it creates two copies — one stored locally on their device and one in the cloud. Previously, when users deleted local copies of photos or videos that were also synced to the service, only one copy would be deleted.
Is anything being done about it?
Google has said that they are aware of the issue and that they are working on a fix. They have also provided a way to make sure your photos are safe in the meantime. The app will warn you when it finds issues with your old photos, but if you don’t want to wait for the app update there is an easy work-around.
If you’re a Mac user: Open Finder and go to Go > Go To Folder then type ~/Library/Application Support/Google into the box.
What should you do if you were affected?
The first thing you should do if you’ve been affected is to try the following steps: – If you backed up the photos before they were corrupted, restore your photos from backup. – If you didn’t back up the photos and want to recover them from another source, contact a professional data recovery service provider. – If you want to view or share any corrupted photo that’s not backed up or recovered from another source, try saving it as a different file format like PNG.
Some extra tips from Reddit users
-If you have a backup of your photos and videos on any other service like Dropbox or an external hard drive, consider using that as your primary storage for them. If you don’t have a backup but still want to use Google Photos as a secondary cloud storage, make sure you don’t delete the photos in the original folder.
-Do not upload new photos or videos to your computer until this issue is fixed.
-Try submitting a report to the app store where you downloaded the app.
A look at what happened
Google Photos is a nifty service that helps you back up and organize your photos. The app automatically uploads photos to the cloud so you can access them on any device. It’s free to use and offers unlimited storage for pictures up to 16MP in size or video clips of up to 1080p resolution.
The steps you can take to fix it
Google has acknowledged the bug and is working to fix it. For now, we recommend that you stop uploading new photos to your library until the issue is resolved. You can also keep an eye on Google’s help forum for updates on this issue. In the meantime, if you need to make changes or corrections to old photos in your library, you can download them from the Photos section of your account and then edit them using another photo-management program like Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Photos app.
Information on how you can get your pictures back
Google’s photo service has a bug that corrupts your old photos if you use the Organize feature to back them up. If you’re using Google Photos as your backup service and this is affecting your photos, there are a few things you can do to try and get them back.
First off, you should make sure that any old photos you still need are backed up on another device or hard drive.
What this means for you and what Google can do about it
It has been reported by several users that when they attempted to upload their photos to Google Photos and select the High quality option, they are instead receiving a low-quality version of the photo. The issue is not a result of an issue with the user’s camera or computer but rather with how old files are being handled by Google’s image processing software.