Google Photos offers more than just letting you view and manage the images and videos on it like other gallery apps. One of its most prominent functions is creating a backup of your images and videos on cloud storage, which is also accessible on various shared devices.
That said, the Google Photos app has its quirks. In addition to not providing a satisfactory user interface for device folders (other albums in the collection), it is difficult to delete photos. Sure, you can just hit the delete button, but that will delete the photos from everywhere — phone as well as cloud storage.
What if a person just wants to delete a photo from Google Photos without deleting it from their phone? Surprisingly, it’s not as easy as turning the switch off. That is what we will explore here. But before we get started, let’s first understand how Google Photos works.
Why does Google Photos delete photos from the phone
By default, backup and sync options are disabled on Google Photos. When first enabled on your phone, Google Photos saves the photos and videos contained in the camera folder to the cloud storage space associated with your Google account. Any new photos will also be synced. Backup and synchronization is disabled for albums in the library, but you can also synchronize them. Here we will focus on camera files but the basic principle remains the same.
So when an image or video syncs through the Google Photos app, it creates two copies — online and on-device. Only one is shown to you. If you want to save space on your phone, you can delete your device copy using Google Photos’ built-in option. If you do that, you won’t be able to access the file on any other gallery app because you’re left with the online version of the file. However, you can only view online copies of those files in the Google Photos app.
While it’s easy to keep a file on Google Photos and delete it from the device, it’s not as straightforward to do so the other way around. When you delete a synced photo from the Google Photos app, it’s deleted from your phone and cloud storage.
What happens when you delete photos
Sometimes, you want to delete photos from Google Photos. You must have tried doing that and not getting the desired results. Here are a few cases to help you understand things better.
Case 1: Delete photos on a phone with Backup & Sync enabled
When backup and sync is on and you delete a synced photo from the Google Photos app, it’s deleted from everywhere. To be precise, it is removed from the Google Photos app, website, phone gallery, and file manager app.
Case 2: Delete photos on phone with Backup & Sync turned off
After syncing photos, if you delete them while backup & sync option is turned off, the result will be the same as before. The aforementioned photo will be deleted from your phone memory. But if you recently turned off sync, the photos will still appear on other shared devices. When you enable backup and sync again on the same device, the photos are deleted from all shared devices.
Case 3: Delete Photos on Website with Backup & Sync Off
Another thing you can do is delete photos on the Google Photos website with mobile backup and sync turned off. Once you do that, the images will be instantly deleted from other synced devices. Because your backup and sync options are disabled on your phone, the photos continue to reside on your phone and show up in your gallery and file manager apps.
Now, if you turn on backup and sync on your phone, the photos will reappear on the Google Photos website because the original files of the photos continue to reside on the phone.
Note:
Solution
The only solution that seems to work is to move the file to an unsynced folder using the file manager.
Here are the steps:
Step 1: Open the file manager app on your device and create a new folder on the internal storage. Let’s name it GP Test. You can name it anything.
Note: I used the Mi File Manager app
Step 2: Then, using the file manager again, navigate to Internal Storage > DCIM > Camera. This folder contains photos taken with your phone’s camera.
Step 3: Here, select all the photos that you want to remove from Google Photos and tap Move.
Step 4: Navigate to the new folder (GP Test) you created above and paste the files there.
When you do, the files are automatically deleted from the camera folder of the Google Photos app on your phone.
You can access those files from the newly created folder (GP Check) using Google Photos or any other gallery app.
Make sure backup and sync is not enabled for the new local folder. To confirm, go to the Albums section of the Google Photos app and find the folder. The cloud icon with the upper line indicates the folder has not been synced.
Step 5: If deleted photos still appear on the web version, you need to delete them manually from the web. To do so, launch the Google Photos website and delete the photo. Deleting them will not affect the photos in the newly created folder (GP Check) on your phone.
Note:
At any time, if you want to recover deleted photos, open the Trash on Google Photos and restore them.
Turn off Backup & Sync
The instructions above are for old photos on your phone. If you don’t want to sync new photos with Google Photos, you’ll need to turn off backup and sync in your settings. To do so, open the Google Photos app and tap the three-bar menu in the top left corner. Go to Settings.
Tap Backup & sync and turn it off on the next screen.
Go Google!
I wish things were different and there was a simple way to just delete photos from Google Photos. Unfortunately, that’s not available right now. You will have to disable backup and sync for new photos or use the method above.
However, don’t just save photos on your phone. Your phone might get stolen or stop working causing you to lose all your precious memories. If you don’t want to use Google Photos for backups, you can try alternatives like Prime Photos, Flickr, or use cloud storage like Google Drive.
Next up: How is Google Drive different from Google Photos? Let’s find out together.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
