r/googlephotos

I have used Google Photos forever and never had an issue. Now when I try to use the “free up space” feature it doesn’t work. I know the photos are backed up to Google Photos. My phone is out of storage so I am trying to offload them from my iPhone photo app and nothing is working. I have tried pressing on the app Icon and hitting “free up space”, I have gone into the account settings to try and do the same but nothing is working. I take a photo, see that Google Photos back it up, try to hit “free up space on phone” and nothing. Please help. Is there another app I can use? If this is an ongoing problem the I don’t want to use Google Photos anymore. Also the fact they have no customer service phone number??

I'm a long time user of Google Photos, which I used to store photos from different eras. From digital cameras to mobile phones, there are many photos (especially in the past), where the same photos is saved twice or more, as we copy from the SD card to 1 folder, then a 2nd time in another folder.

While photos from phones are automatically backed up, I would still want to keep a copy of the photos in the PC. I have changed to a new phone, and I want to move the photos from my 4 year old phone to the PC, but I worry it may upload duplicate photos again.

It used to be fine when Google Storage is free, but limited space now, I will want to delete the duplicate photos to free storage.

I have 2 questions:

1. for current photos uploaded in different folders, what will be the easy way to extract the duplicate copies of the same photo and move it outside of Google Photos?

2. for my backup of photos from my old phone, what is a good way to prevent duplicates being uploaded into Google Photos? Does google identify that this photo has actually been uploaded?

for context, i'm transferring almost 2 years of photos and videos totaling to about 400gb from my work account to my personal one and since i kept putting this task off, i'm cramming it now, with my last day at work being this coming friday.

so like others have done, i turned on partner sharing to share all my photos from work with my personal then turned auto-save so that they would be like backed up on my personal. the thing now is google photos skipped some (a lot actually) of the photos so there would be for example, in november 2025, 900 photos not saved/backed up on my personal out of the 3000 photos in that month on my work acc. and they're scattered throughout the month. meanwhile, nov 2024-july 2025 and jan 2026 - present seem to have been saved/backed up perfectly.

now when i check the skipped photos, select them, and click save, nothing happens. no little cloud on the lower right corner that should indicate it has been saved/backed up and they also don't reflect on my personal acc photos page still. why is this happening and how do i solve this?

https://preview.redd.it/8et6878fy7kh1.png?width=1618&format=png&auto=webp&s=c8d1a373a675e039500f60036116c211450807b9

Why does this use so much resources and have no way to resume/properly do large imports, I have a 5 5600x and 32gb of ram. I'm switching over from immich because my living situation is changing and I can't run a home server and 5tb for $200 a year plus all the other perks seemed like a good deal.

Is there any better way to do big uploads, or a proper app for the desktop?

I am in the UK. On Google photos on my Pixel Pro 10 XL, when I click to create a new album it gives me the option to create an auto-updating album of a particular person, based on the "people and pets" faces. However when I choose one, I just get stuck on "loading photos" forever. It never adds any pictures to the album. All my photos are backed up to Google drive.  I've tried using the web app, I've tried clearing cache, I've tried clearing storage and resyncing all my photos. I've tried restarting my phone. I've tried creating an album then syncing with a particular person after but I don't get any option for "automatically add pictures" Google Gemini suggested to me. I cannot seem to find any way to get this to work. 

My account got banned. Happened for the second time. Should have moved off of google mail and photos a long time ago. Some times accidentally we may do reverse image search on something is all I can think of. Other than that, I only had my kids photos over there. Do not know if reverse image search or google search can also lead to a ban. The first time around, it was not even that. Did not take it seriously as I thought it was erroneously flagged. Google should advertise in bold letter and send email every month to tell people that they can Ban your account. Everything of my life is linked to my google account. Having a panic attack now. I am going to campaign against google so hard. Did not know they could do this. This has financial, career and emotional repercussions for me. I am now getting the meaning of do not let your life into hands of one corporation seriously. Hate this, and for the first time in my life hate google.

I have multiple Google accounts signed into Photos that have their own collection of pictures and videos. A few months ago I had backed up the majority of my photos from my main account into an empty Google account to try and make space. Today I was clearing the excess of downloaded photos that I knew were taking up storage on my main, and then decided to do the same on the empty account to keep that one from filling up too fast. I clicked the "clean up space" button on that account not thinking anything of it, and it ended up clearing all but a couple images from my main account. Everything on my device is still saved to the other account so my important pictures and videos aren't entirely lost, but I can't access them on the main like before. I wanted to try using the "undo back-up" button to try and reverse this, but I've never used it before and don't want to screw things up further for myself. The initial "clean up space" button ended up wiping the majority of pictures from my internal storage for some reason (which is linked to my main), so I don't know if using the "undo back-up" would restore everything back to the internal storage? I also don't have a default gallery app (my phone didn't have one when I got it) so I think that just adds to the issue. If anyone could help me figure out how to reverse this, I would be forever grateful.

OMG Google! I was using the Google Drive Windows app to sync my 'PHOTOS' directory to my Google Photos account. As you know, this method is no longer supported, so yesterday I enabled the backup functionality using the Google Photos web app. Unfortunately, Google Photos decided to also synchronise my RAW files by converting them to JPG, which didn't happen at any time while using Google Drive. Now I have lots of duplicate files in my Google Photos account and I don't know where to start to fix this issue. Any suggestions, please?

I have a 100 gig storage on Google and I'm starting to slowly run out of storage on my phone, and I am wondering if there is a way to just have it onto my Google storage instead of my phone?

I’m currently paying for both google and iCloud but I don’t want to pay for google photos anymore. However when I delete photos off google photos it deletes off iCloud and my phone photos which scares me. Is there a way to cancel google photos backup without losing the photos from my camera roll and iCloud? It seems to have synced them together

I set up a Locked Folder in Google Photos on my Pixel 8 Pro. It’s set to store files on my device only with backup disabled for it, as I don't want these photos synced to Google Drive/Photos cloud.

It was working fine initially, but now it's acting up:

Moving photos to the Locked Folder: When I add photos, a message pops up at the bottom saying "Photos moved to Locked Folder." However, when I open the folder, the newly added photos aren't there—they just disappear from my main library entirely.

Moving photos out of the Locked Folder: When I try to restore/unlock existing photos, I get a message saying "Photos moved," but they never show up back in my main gallery or normal folders.

Basically, any photo I try to move in or out of the Locked Folder completely vanishes.

Has anyone else run into this bug? I’d really appreciate any advice or fixes for this!

Hey everyone, I've been trying to solve a photo migration problem that's gotten more complicated the more I dig into it, and I'd love some advice from people who've tackled something similar.

The situation:

I have two Google accounts:

• Account 1 — has most of my photos going back to 2007, mixed storage quality (some Original, some Storage Saver/compressed). The dates and times on these photos are mostly correct.
• Account 2 — has 5TB of space and is where I want everything to live going forward, at Original quality.

I also have the actual original-quality files scattered across my phone, an old laptop backup, and an external drive.

The core problem:

The dates and timestamps on many of my local original files are wrong or corrupted — probably from old sync apps, WhatsApp forwards, or re-saves over the years. So I can't just bulk upload my local originals, because they'd show up in Google Photos under the wrong date and mess up my whole timeline.

Account 1 has the correct dates for most of these photos — but the quality might be compressed, and the filenames are often completely different from my local copies of the same photo.

So I have:

• ✅ Correct dates → Account 1
• ✅ Original quality → local files
• ❌ No easy way to connect them because names don't match and quality differs

What I've tried:

Right now I'm doing this manually: open Account 1 on my laptop, find a folder (organized by year), open the same year folder on my phone, rename the local file to match, push it to the Camera folder, and let it upload. One folder at a time. It works but it's going to take forever across 19 years of photos.

What I'm trying to figure out:

1. Is there a tool (Mac-based preferred) that can match photos across different quality levels and filenames based on visual similarity or metadata?
2. Has anyone used Google Takeout exports as a "date reference" to fix timestamps on local files before re-uploading?
3. Is there a smarter bulk upload workflow that preserves the correct date from the photo's EXIF rather than the file's modification date?
4. Any experience with tools like digiKam, Czkawka, exiftool, or similar for something like this?

My setup:

• Mac (latest macOS)
• ~10,000–20,000 photos spanning 2007–present
• Photos are a mix of JPG and HEIC, some PNG
• Not a developer but comfortable following instructions and running basic terminal commands if someone walks me through it

Any advice, pointers to tools, or "here's what I'd do" responses are really appreciated. I've been going at this manually and I know there has to be a better way!

How do you remove the Google Photos watermark when sharing a collage? It used to be fine up until about a week ago smh. I have the 2TB plan if that even makes a difference.

I've been using Google Photo's for years to auto upload screenshots and text images as well as my normal photos. In my work, I frequently need to search for, say, all the screenshots including phrases with the word 'Nazi' to find a source.

A couple of years ago, despite turning off all age and 'sensitivity' filters, it stopped returning any results for that and any 'DEI' related language like racist, queer, even disabled (I'm a disability activist who writes about eugenics and Aktion T4).

I've contacted them many times and never had an answer other than 'you should be able to see them'. More recently, I suspect they want me to use Gemini but I don't want my photos in that ecosystem. It was happening before Gemini was an option though.

I've seen photo storage places with face searches but it's OCR text search I need across devices. Something secure where the cost isn't my photos and sources being scraped for AI.

Does anything like that exist?

Backup your memories. Not your memes.

Your photos deserve better than your screenshots.

8,000 photos. How many actually matter?

Camera photos: YES.

Screenshots: NO.

Memes: NO.

Videos: NO.

📷 1,240 real photos

📱 3,812 screenshots

😂 1,429 memes

🎥 2,519 videos

Why back up all of that?

Also sick of bullshit answers like "clear your browser cache and cookies" and all that crap that doesn't fix it at all ever.
Internet connection is great, so that's not it either.

I select one of my videos, and it refuses to start. Forever spinny waiting animation.

I'm actually paying for 2TB of storage. I expect there not these kind of delays starting a video.
I literally have no access to the videos I uploaded!
That's what I'm paying for?

Sorry if this has already been asked. I have photos in my camera roll, that are also in a shared album for work. I want to delete them off my camera roll, but when I do, they disappear off the album.

I tried "delete from device" but it's still on my camera roll so i don't get the point.

My coworker deleted all hers and they stayed in the album. But mine disappeared.

My coworker has an iPhone and I have an android, not sure if that matters.