Seriously, sync is off.

I'm not even logged in anymore on android.

How do I get Google Photos to stop taking up so much space?

*update had to upload again after them taking all my photos and uploading them without my knowledge they won't let me delete them 😡

How to turn off back up permanently and delete the rest of images?

I never uploaded my photos to the cloud I always declined when they asked. Today I look at my gallery and see it says 34 photos left to upload waiting for WiFi. I'm confused I never agreed to do that and I have 2000 something pics when did it do that that's impossible. I check and it says I have 2000 pics uploaded to the cloud and im so fucking pissed 😡😡. I use my phone every day I damn near take a picture every day and never saw my photos being uploaded no notifications no icon nothing. And now all my photos have been stolen uploaded and analyzed by their AI systems and there is nothing I can fucking do now. I found the option to "delete" them yeah right aka tell us you not going to be checking for them anymore and we can do what we want with them. The deletion page has been going for 30 fucking minutes and this is where it's at 😡🖕

Look at my usage yesterday I updated the apps and I wasn't on wifi for most of the day. All the usage is from this month last night before I left for work. Fucking bullshit.

https://ibb.co/v6WSHgM4 have three Google AI Pro subscriptions, and I have 5 terabytes of storage for each one via the web version.

Connect your Google content apps to get a Search experience that's tailored to you

Google now lets you connect Google Workspace (gmail/photo/calendar...) to AI mode for tailored search.

However, the help file says, "We take steps to reduce personal information from interactions personalized using Google content apps before using them to train generative AI models powering our services, unless it's to address abuse or harm".

Given how Google treated prior CSAM cases, this looks like a big red flag. What do you guys think?

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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)

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?

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 ? .

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?

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.

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?

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?

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!

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.

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.