Google Photos is an incredible tool to keep your digital memories safe and sound, and there are a lot of tips and tricks to get the most out of it. At least, that’s what you would hope for a service that promises to hold on to your images for you, complete with machine-learning smarts that make it easy to sift through your library. Some people are experiencing some issues with older images uploaded to the service, with digital artifacts ripping through images.
As spotted by Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii, a few people have taken to the Google Support forums and Reddit to complain about the problem. The reports first started popping up about two days ago, and all of the affected images share similar damage. There are seemingly random lines and dots of missing pixels, replaced by either black or white pixels at random. Most of these artifacts form random-looking lines, like there is just missing data for a few points in the photos. The shapes and forms created this way look almost artistic, but of course, this is probably not what you want your precious memories to look like.
Be sure to view these images in full size to better spot the artifacts
It looks like many images affected were uploaded between 2013 and 2015, with some of the reports specifying the timeframe to May 2013 to May 2015.
How to fix the corrupted Google Photos images
The good news is that the issues have been resolved automatically for some people already. On their end, they can't see the artifacts anymore.
Others who were not so lucky to get an automatic treatment were able to get rid of the artifacts by clearing the cache of the Photos app and opening the affected images again and then see error-free versions.
Thus, it looks like Google still has the original images on its servers. It’s possible that there are just some issues in the transfer process from the servers to the Google Photos app, with individual pixels not arriving on phones and the Google Photos web app for some. If that’s the case, we should be good, and the images should remain safely stored in their original (or lightly compressed) version.
Either way, it’s a good idea to not rely on Google Photos as the only place you back up your precious memories. That goes for every cloud storage solution for any of your data, not just photos, unrelated to this incident. In our guide on how to delete your Google account forever, we have a section that explains how you can export your data (and thus, your photos) from your account to create a local copy. Personally, I make an updated copy every three months or so, just to have my data available both locally and online should anything ever go haywire.
We’ve reached out to Google for comment on the Google Photos issue.