u/JQbd

My girlfriend and I just got back from a mini vacation and she shared about 150 of the photos she took on her Galaxy S25 with me, originally through a shared OneDrive folder because it would keep the metadata. I saved all of them and yes, the metadata was preserved but the images are refusing to upload to iCloud. The app doesn’t even register that there are any images that require uploading.

I played around a bit to see if maybe it was a file type thing. Her phone, like mine, is set to take photos as HEIF/HEIC and that’s how they were saving. I saved from my PC to my iCloud Files and converted an image to a separate HEIC, PNG, and JPG. I saved them all and they synced but they lost all their metadata. However when I saved the original from the Files app it still had the metadata but remained unsynced, no different than saving directly from OneDrive.

We just tried a couple things on her end as well: she changed the file type then shared via QR code scan but it’s not actually registering the file type change and still saves as a HEIF.

There is one final theory I have but I’m not actually sure if it’s the case so confirmation would be awesome: all of her photos are named YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS (so a photo taken on March 16, 2026 at 11:30:25 would be 20260516_113025) whereas all of my images and photos are IMG_####. The latter are how the photos I changed file types (and synced without metadata) of are saved.

Is there a way to make her Android-taken photos with metadata compatible for iCloud Photos sync, or will I have to save them without the metadata and manually edit the time and dates? I really would rather not do the latter but will if it’s the only option.

Thank you for any help.

I’m not sure if the flair is correct for this so please let me know what may be suited better!

My girlfriend and I recently went on a road trip that had us passing through an area that I lost signal in but she did not. Because of this, we switched from my CarPlay and Apple Maps to her Android Auto and Google Maps.

This is the first time I’ve ever had Android Auto used in my Explorer so imagine my surprise when the map directions started showing up on the instrument display! I’ve never had that happen with my setup and we thought maybe it’s Google Maps, so I installed that and tried it out but nothing changed leading me to believe it could be an Android Auto compatibility if not a setting somewhere that I haven’t found.

Does anyone know if it’s possible for CarPlay to show directions like this or is it isolated to being on the main screen?

Thanks!