If you are coming across corrupted photos in your Google Photos library, then don’t worry. You are not alone. This has become a “trending” issue on the Google support pages now. The good news is that Google is fixing it.
It began with a Google Photos support thread that came over the weekend from a user complaining about “water-stained” photos. “Issue looks like a water stain with massive discoloration,” they wrote. They continue to describe the problem in a follow-up reply to the thread:
“Most of the photos are from around 2014. These are pictures I know for a fact were uploaded and saved properly. I noticed the issue today in a photo flashback event. I have tried viewing on multiple browsers as well as downloading the photos into local memory. There is seemingly no pattern to which photos are corrupted and which aren’t.”
With time, more people came with the same problem. “Confirming I also have this issue, was looking for some old photos of family and noticed this on almost all of them,” writes another user, who posted more sample photos.
“Just been looking through anniversary photos, on Google photos, from 8 years ago and many images are shown as corrupted,” writes a user in another thread. The virtually waterlogged photos started appearing on Reddit and in various Google-related sub-Reddits, too.
If you are looking for proof, there are several examples in multiple Google Support and Reddit threads having complaints from users.
Google responded that its team is “rolling out a fix.” This bug does not impact original photos stored in Google Photos. However, you face the problem while downloading images or viewing them on iOS, Android, and the browser.
While the company conjures up a fix, we can take a moment to think that relying on the cloud for storage can go wrong at any time. Therefore, it is smart to have backups on a hard drive if tech seems to go south.
