Don’t make this Google Photos mistake and delete all your vacation pics

Accidentally losing data sucks, but that sting feels especially pronounced when we’re talking about our photographs. Some memories are once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and we’ll never get those pics again. Late last year we shared some problems several Pixel phones were having with failing to save your photos, and we’re rounding out this week with a PSA about a potentially devastating Google Photos issue that users will want to know about.

Google Photos is the app lots of us with Android devices turn to for easy picture management — far more than just Pixel users. Beyond just letting us view and edit our pics, Photos offers easy cloud support for keeping all those memories backed up.

Not all us take advantage of those backups, though, and especially if you’re more comfortable just manually moving files around the old-fashioned way, there’s the chance you might overlook some slightly unintuitive Google Photos behavior — and lose your pics in the process.

Over on Reddit’s Google Pixel sub, user gongarher shares their harrowing experience with a Pixel 10 Pro. After a recent trip, they were trying to move the pictures they took, but found Files by Google struggling to keep up with the task. Instead, they opened up Google Photos and used the app’s sharing function to copy the pics to their phone’s Downloads folder.

Sure enough, once you do this you’ll see two copies of the file on your phone. And pulling up the details in the Files app, you’ll see that one copy is in your camera directory, and one in Downloads. So far, so good, right?

Well, our user only wanted those pics in the Downloads folder, so went back to the originals in Photos and moved them to the trash. But what they didn’t expect to happen: The copies in Downloads got deleted, too.

It turns out that Photos is maybe a little too clever for its own good, and when you use it to delete a pic, it appears to go after all the copies on your device that it knows about. To Google’s credit, when you go to move an image to the trash, you get a message that does disclose that files “will be removed from all folders.”

If instead you select “Delete from device,” you don’t even get that heads-up. Granted, perhaps Google thinks we understand that “from device” implies “in all locations,” but someone comfortable enough to be working with their phone’s file system probably also treats all files as discrete entities, and would never in a million years suspect that deleting one file from their device would also delete all local copies they ever made of the file.

For gongarher, this is lesson learned — and for the rest of you reading, hopefully one you now won’t have to learn the hard way.