Ask HN: Photos corrupted on Google Pixel phones over time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Photos corrupted on Google Pixel phones over time?

7 pointspoolnoodle9 comments

I have had this problem for years now: Scrolling through photos on my phone that are maybe a year old or older I notice grey squares here and there in my Google Photos app (used without an account). The files are properly corrupted - can't view them on other devices either. I checked some out in a hex editor and sure enough there is a good chunk of null bytes in the beginning. Sometimes it's just the first byte and changing it from 00 to FF fixes the image. But oftentimes it's a whole lot more 00s to the point where I don't know how to recover the image.

I've been using only Pixel a-series phones for the last couple years (3a, 6a, 9a) and had this happen on all of them. It surely can't be bad storage, can it? I feel like there is a bug in some part of Google's Android OS.

Has anyone of you encountered this issue? I can't believe I'm alone with it.

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I remember reading this issue on Reddit. Some folks fixed it by installing an older version of Google Photos. I assume you have already tried the usual (deleting cache, reinstalling the app, restarting the phone, checking on the cloud through another device -- the latter might not be possible since you are using without an account).

I don't think it's an app issue once the files are borked. Since I verified there are whole chunks of data missing in the .jpg files I don't see how doing something to the photos app could fix them again.

I don't know how Google Photos stores the photos. Unless you have a backup, it is hard to see if this is a change at the level of files, or that Google Photos has a unique way of storing them that introduces changes to HDR-enabled files. As I said, I'm quoting what worked for people who faced this issue before.

I only use Google Photos as a photo viewer, completely offline, no cloud backups. Like I said, there are definitely file level changes which I inspected on a copy of the files on my computer. Anyway, thanks for participating. I hope I didn't come off as rude.

The same thing has happened to me on a Pixel 7a (maybe also on a 4a). I did not look into it and thought it might be photos that I deleted but the metadata lived on. Very concerning to see it comes from actual data corruption. My strategy is to backup often, now even more so, thanks!

I have heard of this happening before yes. But I am an iPhone user so cannot talk from personal experience.

Serious question, now that there is evidence that Pixel phones are corrupting the actual jpegs what is the best way to safely store smartphone photos now? I usually back them up to an external drive every 6 months or so but wondering if someone has a better process for this.

I mean it's nice that photos are immediately uploaded to the cloud once they are taken but I read that Google Photos does not do 1:1 backups. Apparently the cloud photos are compressed & are worse quality

I think the best way forward is to backup early and backup often to your own computer.

From my iPhone, all of my photos get backed up automatically to iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive (badly without Metadata).

Cloud Photos use to use “Storage Saver” when Google use to have unlimited backups. Now I have it set to original quality.

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