google photos It has become one of the best tools in the cloud to save our personal photos. Thanks to this service, our mobile automatically uploads all the photos to the cloud, and thus allows us to always have a backup of them, as well as allowing us to share them with others and access them from anywhere. A great tool to preserve our digital life. However, even the most powerful platforms are prone to failure. And when we trust it too much, we may end up losing what is most valuable: our memories.
For a few hours now, the network has been filling up with troubled users reporting that their oldest photos have been corrupted in Google Photos. In this link we can see how some photos are appearing to users as having watermarks, and “broken”, as if these digital photos had lost color or information about them had been lost. In some cases, even the photos have been damaged so much that they have become unusable.
It is not known why this is happening, but there are a large number of affected users. In addition, there is no common pattern found among all of them, since the photos have been taken from different devices, and are corrupted both on Windows PC and macOS, and even when accessing them from a smartphone.
But, if we are a bit lucky, all is not lost.
Affected photos can be recovered (almost always)
If you run into this problem while reviewing Google Photos, there are several ways to try to recover the original photos. The first one is to try download the original photos from our mobile. By doing so, some users ensure that the original versions of them are downloaded, thus eliminating the corrupted data. And, if we upload them back to Google Photos, they should no longer cause problems.
Another trick that can help us repair these photos is click on the edit button. Entering the editing section, the corrupted data is regenerated and the imperfections disappear.
If none of the above works, we are left with only one option: download a copy of all our data from Google (including photos) and re-upload it to Google Photos. Of course, we must bear in mind that, if we do this, now the photos that we upload will count as storage, since Google eliminated unlimited photo storage.
Beware of cloud photos
This is not the only problem that users who have relied on uploading their photos to the cloud have faced. In addition to this problem, some users have already encountered other problems when uploading photos directly to the Google cloud. and even to iOS cloud, iCloudwho have found that one of the novelties of iOS 15 was deleting personal photos that users had uploaded.
Photos are something very valuable, at least sentimentally speaking. Therefore, we should not entrust them only to a third party company that literally does not care about our data. Although we upload them, for convenience, to the cloud, it is advisable to have a good backup plan, always keeping the originals on our computer and, in addition, a copy of them in another storage space, either in the cloud (for example, compressed on OneDrive) or on an external hard drive.
