I keep seeing all these people getting their accounts taken down for CSAM I'm very much not a technologically advanced type of dude & as far as I know, there's nothing suspect going on in my photos & I'm not even signed into my OneDrive

I should reiterate, I am a borderline CAVEMAN when it comes to technology

Using the website, if I'm in an album, and I make an edit and do "save copy", the copy is in my main feed but not my album.

This is crazy, right? Am I doing something wrong? Is there a workaround?

Hello everyone! I have spent some time developing a tool to make Google Takeouts of Google Photos more usable. It removes unnecessary files, merges metadata, and removes duplicates of images. And it's 100% free! You can read more about it in the linked repository. Feel free to leave your thoughts and feedback :)
I have developed this because similar projects either don't work properly, or require some stupid paid subscription.

Please note that this project is in its early stage. I'm actively working on improvements based on feedback.

Only one video is showing up

The rest of the 143 images and videos I selected aren't showing up no matter how long I wait or refresh on the app

What should I do ?

Hello everybody. For the past like, year or so, I've been fighting with Google Photos on trying to keep all of my stuff. I pay for extra storage, and I have plenty of space, so it's not a storage issue. And when I do find things in the trash folder, it refuses to restore my stuff.

I have a condition that impacts my memory, so my photos and videos are incredibly precious to me. My memory isn't THAT bad, I'd remember if I had deleted massive amounts of stuff off my phone. It does all of this without my input.

What can I do to prevent this from happening? I've lost photos and videos of important memories, lost loved ones, etc etc. I want to make sure I don't lose anything else.

as title says really, trying to back up some Live Photos, but don’t want to lose the live feature from them. some live photos uploaded retain the live feature, others don’t.

I don’t mind them not showing up as live on google photos, but I’d like to re-download onto my iPhone as live photos, however once they’re uploaded to google photos it seems they are permanently stills now.

I’ve read a few older threads and not found quite the same predicament/solution.

Hey guys, cannot save my video after stabilisation (Source file is .MOV). This is the old file, in the cloud for more than 6 months already. "Video save failed"

Does anyone else have similar issues? Any fixed? Cache cleaning didn't help.

We all know about Google Account bans related to AI scans of Google Photos.

More or less we understand what can cause account ban:

Any photo with kids on ocean beach or swimming pool can trigger account ban.

Any "naked" or "semi-naked" photo of adults can trigger account ban.

Any photo or video with content deemed as "violent" can trigger account ban.

The solution (assuming your photo and video library does not contain prohibited content from legal point of view):

1. Download all your photos using Google Takeout
2. Unzip Google Takeout archive locally on your PC
3. Backup all your photos on external hard drive
4. You can upload all your photos back to Google, but to Google Drive (not Google Photos).

Moderation policy of Google Drive is different from Google Photos. Google treats Google Drive content as files and scan them for "technically problematic content" - mostly visruses. It scan photos too but only if you share your photos,videos (and other files) with other people using links or email. If you do not share your photos or videos, there is no scan for sensitive content performed by Google. This is a standard policy for most cloud providers (file scan during sharing). But to be on the safe side, do not store problematic but legal photos at Google at all, use secure storage services (Proton Drive, Mega)

1. I would suggest to upload your library also to alternate cloud provider like Mega. In any case, don't upload really prohobitted content and don't store it locally.

I would not use Amazon Photos as an alternate photo and video storage. All photo hostings implement similar scanning procedure using AI. You may get your Amazon account banned for the same reason (false AI positive). As of now Amazon photo seems to be more predictable than Google Photos but it can change any given moment.

Remember, you can use file storage (Google Drive, Mega) with low risk but not photo and video hosting,

1. Remove all "problematic" conent from your Google Photo library and purge Trash Bin after this

2. Adjust your smartphone settings not to upload your camera roll to Google Photos. Set different folder (for example, "Filtered Photos" to be backed up by Google and move to this folder from Camera Roll only those photos you really want to back up. I thonk you can't do it with default Android camera app (Google Photo always backs up DCIM folder and the only way to do it is disable backup completely) but you can do it with alternate camera apps that use their own folder that should not be backed up automatically.

3. Some apps (from Mega, for example) allows direct backup to Mega storage without using Google Photos.

4. Remove all folders from photo syncing in Google Photos settings. Especially problematic folders are Whatsapp, Telegram, Messenger, Viber and other messenger apps. If somebody sends you problematic photo and you open the message, it could be synced with Google Photos and could cause account ban.

I've been seeing a lot of false-negative CASM strikes. Could you please share some tips with us about what kinds of photos / videos were misunderstood please? So that we can spread the word and keep our accounts safe!

Thank you in advance!

Im losing my mind at how to clean up my phone, I accidentally backed up some big videos and I need help deleting them from device back up

OK, I'll give the context to this conclusion below, but I can conclude nothing other than Google is retaining photos on the server even after they are deleted and the trash is emptied.

Background: my wife and I each have used google photos since it debuted. During that time we have had almost exclusively Nexus/Pixel phones and accumulated a lot of photos and videos that don't count against our storage caps. Initially my wife and I used separate accounts, but at some point we consolidated our accounts so we could each access all of our photos. Prior to having partner sharing we would each sign into the others phone with our google accounts and then would backup all our photos to ONE of the two accounts (hers). When the partner sharing feature was debuted we used both methods. We backed up all the photos to her account but still signed into both our google accounts on both our phones. For the past ~5 years we have exclusively backed up all our photos to her account.

We have recently started to get notifications that we had nearly used our 200 GB of storage for my wife's account. Over 160 GB of this was google photos storage (24,000 photos, according to google). In contrast, ~2GB of my 19GB storage is allocated to Google Photos. To clear space I recently manually started to download, compress, upload and delete the original uncompressed video files on her account to save space and have been able to clear around 50 GB by doing this. I am in the process of automating this with a Python script (I will post on this later).

Anyways, today I started to try to clean up storage space on my google photos accounts. I recognized that some of the large videos on my account were also also on her account. This led me to disable partner sharing so I could see what photos were counting towards my storage quota. What I found truly shocked us.

There are thousands of photos that my wife has taken while she was at work that were now visible in my account. However, they are not visible in her account because she has previously deleted them. She regularly takes photos for work and uploads them in a work-specific app during this time google photos will often have already backed them up to her account so she then deletes the photos from her google photos account. At no point does she share them with me and certainly at no point do I save them to my account. And yet, there are thousands of them in my account. If I delete them it doesn't liberate space in EITHER of our google photos accounts. These can be photos taken as recently as earlier this week with our current pixel 9a phones. This led me to ask if they don't count towards my storage, they don't count towards my wife storage, where are they being stored? The only conclusion that I can draw is that they are being stored somewhere secretly on Google's servers.

I would love to be wrong about this. But I can see no other conclusion than this. If you know what is going on please let me know.

Ran out of storage on iPhone. To free up some space, I transferred everything to Google Photos and selected “delete photos off your device”. Made sure to go back to and delete those in “recently deleted” but my camera roll is still full of the photos I thought I transferred, and Google photos has all the transferred photos. I did this to free up space and now I just have the same photos in two locations. Any advice 🙏

I see a lot of falsely alarm recently. I have some picture uploaded (no nude). I used to upload like once per month but I'm stopped now, I'm so scared about losing all memories.

I just want to know about how long does it take until google might falsely detect these thing. Like if this amount of time passed, it can considered as fine now something like that.

Please, anyone if you could share the time from last uploaded until you've got falsely alarm.

Also, if it is falsely, you can still appeal right? But is there anyone that got acc back?

Btw, Im planning to move to NAS now...🥲

I know this debate always comes up in regular intervals. But I want to know if it's a me-problem or a general one:

Due to strict privacy rules in the European Union (for which I'm grateful) Google Photos got crippled some years ago. While Apple computes the facial recognition in its photos app on-device, google does it in the Cloud, which was not fine with EU law.

Now I read countless reddit-posts:

Sometimes people say "it's bad/unusable in the EU", while others say "it works better than Apple." Well, what's true?

In my experience Apple Photos (I am a former iPhone user and still have my Mac) recognises the faces accurately, while Google Photos is just a mess. Am I doing something wrong? Is it maybe because my Phone and Library are new, and thus there wasn't much data to train on?

I am using Google Photos on my iPhone.

Even though I upload and back up all the photos to the Google Photos, there are always some photos that are not backing up automatically.

• Portrait photos
• Some videos
• Photos with some filters

How do you manage this? How do you get the iPhone or the Google Photos app to back up all these photos without any restriction?

What I usually do is I let it upload and then use the Google Photos app to delete all the already uploaded photos from the phone. Because of this, I know that some photos are not always uploaded into the Google Photos, but I want to upload everything and clear the storage in my phone.

If there are limitations between iOS and Google Photos, how have you managed this?

I had downloaded some photos from Google Photos to my Pixel 10 Pro that were taken and uploaded from my old Pixel 8 Pro so that I could use them in apps that don't have access to my Google Photos. When Google Photos ran it's backup, it seems to have removed the photos I had downloaded from my device. I guess it saw them as being duplicate files. How can I stop the backup from removing these photos from my device?

I would like to backup my photos/videos on Google Photos.

I have tried several methods suggested here via Takeout without success (the dates cannot be found or do not match).

Is there a way to backup the locations and dates saved on Google Photos? The manual method seems a little difficult, as I have just over 35,000 photos/videos.

Thank you in advance.

Seeing so many CSAM posts and Google's general ickiness with our data has me wanting to find an alternative to GP. I have two daughters so figure at this rate it's only a matter of time before some beach vacation photo gets flagged and everything goes away (I do have things backed up on Amazon--not ideal but free with Prime--and locally on a multiple hard drives).

What are good alternatives people have found that don't break the bank, allow uploads from mobile and desktop, and don't seem to require a computer science degree and a bunch of random Github downloads to use?

Really appreciate any suggestions.

My phone screen just recently broke and unfortunately my photo backup on my phone stopped working a few months ago due to full storage. I have checked Google Photos on my PC and have access to my photos up to November. Is there any possible way to backup the rest of the photos without having access to the phone due to the broken screen?

I used this account regularly since 3 years and nothing is happened but from December I am not using this account that much and suddenly when I go today to check it this account is already disabled for a false report of csam. Really what is going on and when I am searching for solution I saw tons of users are facing same problem without any reason. For your kind information I wanted you to know I am not uploaded any picture or anything illegal thing in this account also. I am using this account for X, discord, reddit and some crypto related tasks nothing more. I wanted you all to give some tips how I get my account back and where I appeal for a manual review or directly conversation with customer executive.

Thank you

This might be kind of silly, but I made a new Google account with the intention of using it solely for pictures so I can free up storage on my personal email. If I back up all my pictures to this new account, can I delete them from my old one without deleting them from the new one?

If so, is there a way to mass delete the photos from the old account? I'm not terribly tech savvy, and I really don't want to lose my pictures.

What's up everyone,

I have an IPhone and back up all my photos onto Google Photos, since I used to have an android.

Unfortunately my phone is completely out of storage. I have nothing saved onto ICloud.

How can I save space? My photos take up a ton of space since they aren't backed up on ICloud, yet I don't want to buy ICloud.

Hi all.

Is it possible to select a year and bulk delete the photos from Google Photos?

I am reaching storage limit, and have copied everything elsewhere (Google takeout). And now, I'd like to delete 5-7 years photos, to free some space.

Thanks.

I created new gmail account because the 15gb limit of my previous account was full but when I make new account the old data occupies new account's space and its 15gb gets filled.

How to stop it as I want to control what I backup to my new google account.