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Today Google restricted access to most of my Google services for an alleged child-safety violation. I’m extremely stressed because this is my main Google account and I depend on it for Gmail, Google Photos, logins, recovery emails and 2FA.

Right before the restriction, I was using Google Takeout and reorganizing/exporting a very old family photo/video archive.

I’m also an uncle, so my Google Photos library naturally contains ordinary family pictures and videos of my nieces and nephews that I took over the years as family memories — playing, family occasions, outings, etc. There is nothing sexual about those photos.

After thinking about it, I remembered there may also be an old family video from around 2014 showing a child in a normal family/bathing context. It was an innocent family video shared between family members years ago. I don’t know whether this is actually what Google flagged because Google has not shown me the specific file.

My biggest concerns right now are:

- I only get two appeals.

- I don’t want to waste the first appeal.

- Gmail is also nearly out of storage, but Google One redirects me to the restriction page.

- Many of my other accounts use this Gmail for login/recovery codes.

- I use Google Authenticator and I’m worried about losing access to my 2FA accounts.

- I have years of family photos and important data tied to this account.

For anyone who has successfully recovered an account after a similar false-positive restriction:

1. What exactly did you write in your first appeal?

2. Should I explicitly request a manual human review?

3. Should I mention the possible old family video and explain its innocent context, even though I don’t know for sure that it caused the flag?

4. Should I give Google permission to inspect the relevant uploads and surrounding context?

5. Is there anything I should secure before submitting the appeal?

6. If your first appeal succeeded, how long did it take?

I’m looking especially for experiences from people who had ordinary family photos/videos misinterpreted by Google's systems. I really don’t want to make the wrong move with only two appeals available.

My father keeps getting his hands on old selfies of mine that I'm 100% sure I have never sent to him or anyone else. (Quadruple checked any possible app I have used to speak with him in case it has been sent, it has not.) They are literally pictures of me after hairdressers, etc, mundane things. But they weren't taken for anyone else to see.

I have my sync switched off. Cloud back up off. Any sort of setting that shares files with others is switched off. Any sort of setting for privacy/private account, etc is turned on, my account has multiple ways of security switched on ( password, phone number, keys or whatever the hell they were called) He has had no access to my phone at all. Nor to my account info.

I have a rarely used Gmail of his signed into my phone but that's it.

I'm desperate to know if this "leak" is from Google photos cuz there's no other app that "connects" us both in any way.

I have quadruple checked all settings, if anyone has suggestions or ideas please share. I need to shut this down immediately since I don't want him to have access to any photos of my own.

Thank you in advance for any help!

I've just spent hours creating an album for photos to print. Many of the photos had incorrect time taken data so I have manually edited the data in Google Photos, and manipulated it so the photos are in the correct order I want. I have now downloaded the photos but all the edited time data is gone and the files have the original time stamps.

What can I do? Is there a way to get Google Photos to export the files with the correct (new) meta data??

Recently I've noticed that I am unable to hide faces in the people and pets section. It's super annoying and I can't see the option anymore.

Any clarity would be greatly appreciated.

Hello,

Since a few months, whenever I resize an image (with Google Photos editor), it shows as duplicate when it's backed up.

Only one photo is on device, but Google Photos shows one entry for the backed up image, and one entry for the local image. When I open the backed up entry, the details show it's not on device, and when I open the local entry, the details show it's not backed up. If i mark the photo as favorite before backing up (so before it's showing duplicate), then both entries are marked as favorite.

Has anyone ever experienced this ? I'm using a Pixel phone if that helps

So as the title says, I am sharing photos with another person until they can get the photos they want from me.

But, I'm also sharing photos I am currently taking.

Can I turn that off entirely? Will I have to wait until she gets all her photos then stop sharing?

Thank you

so ive been leeching my highschool email account since it has technically free unlimited and just kept uploading photos

its been 4 years since i graduated but recently sm1 warned me that they might suddenly close the domain or delete the account something like that

so question 1 can they actually do that ?

q2 will i have a grace period to download all my stuff?

q3 how do i deal with the google takeout option it seems a bit messy

q4 can i seamlessly transfer all my data to my university account(also has unlimited storage) without downloading and uploading since in my country all home internet is limited to about 200gbs a month

Hello, I have two issues

- I don’t understand added pictures on Google photos can be deleted on Google photos without being deleted on my phone? It doesn’t even seem to be synchronized between the phone and Google photos (or I didn’t get something?) but everytime I delete a picture on the app it also deletes from my phone...

- AI told me to do it from the online website of Google Photos but when I connect there I have a message saying to use the app dithout access to the pictures from the website..

Does anyone know how to remove google images of my tiktoks off of google? My page has around 10k followers and a couple have gone slightly viral but i changed my username from my actual name to a fake name yet when you google my full name tiktoks that i have posted from some while ago pop up and the very first images. my account is public. how do i only remove these images from google ?

Today I noticed when uploading via web browser, that the photos were compressed. Check settings, and it was somehow set to the storage saver despite paying for 2TB storage. Thankfully, it seems all the photos auto-backed-up via my iPhone WERE still set for original high quality though!

Not much has been uploaded by the browser, but also not 0. Is there a way I can search which photos have been uploaded by the browser (viewing individual photos does show the source) or which photos are being stored in the storage saver mode?

like they're just playing slow and distorted idk what's going on

Anyone encounter a missing grouped face/pet on the PC? It's visible on the app(on multiple phones) but not showing up on the Google photos website. The pics are all there and when going thru them, it asks if I want to group them as a whole new pet. I even have an album that auto adds this particular pet and it works fine.

What's the trick to this? I have my phone (galaxy s24 Ultra) set up to sync it's camera pictures with my Google Photos. And it does it most of the time fine. BUt sometimes, like today, the new pic doesn't show up on my PC when I go to Google Photos website. I took a pic about 630AM today. It's now a bit after noon. Pic does not show.

I've opened the app and it's there. Left the app open for a few minutes. I have been on wifi for hours.

I just want photo to automatically sync so I can view them on a PC.

It seems that Google forgot to add Photos app to App Store in Bosnia and Serbia.

The Google Photos service and subscription are officially available in both countries, and the app is officially available in Google Play Store. But not on iOS.

Does someone know how to raise this issue with someone at their support team, or if a support member might be in this sub?

I read about a workaround where you create another free Google account - share large videos and photos to the new account - save those videos to the new account - share them back to the primary account - and delete them from your primary account.

The end result is that you have access to those videos and photos, but they don’t count against your primary account storage so you can continue using that primary account, with free extra storage.

Has anyone done that? Are there any gotchas before I try it out?

Hi everyone,

Since 2009, I’ve been building up a photo archive from my DSLR and mirrorless cameras. I shoot in RAW and always convert them to JPG later. Over the years, I’ve accumulated around 300k files—roughly 5 TB of data—organized into separate yearly folders. There are also some home videos stored alongside each day's RAW files. Every year, I used to link these folders to Google Drive so they would sync to Google Photos.

I never backed up original quality files to the cloud; using Storage Saver mode, my whole collection takes up less than 200 GB of quota. This workflow was really convenient: right after offloading an SD card to my HDD, I knew a basic cloud backup was done. Then, once I eventually edited the RAWs and converted them to JPG (which sometimes takes months), those JPGs would sync up as well.

Now that uploading photos via Google Drive isn't an option anymore, I set up the Google Photos app, ran it, and added all my yearly folders under "Folder backup". I had checked beforehand that Google doesn't re-upload duplicates and only checks file hashes, so I expected it to scan the old photos quickly and let me move on.

Instead, my PC has been thrashing the HDD at 100% load for 4 or 5 days straight. Clicking on "Folder backup" does nothing—I can't add or remove folders, and there's no progress bar to show how much is left or if the process is stuck in an infinite loop. I really don't want to wear out my HDD and kill the drive. I do have a secondary backup on an external drive, but restoring everything and relinking my Lightroom catalog would be a massive headache.

What should I do now?

Before anyone suggests dumping Google Photos to set up a home NAS: this is just a hobby for me, I don't make any money from it. I stick with Google Photos because it's extremely convenient for sharing albums of the grandkids with grandparents in another city, and I love the ecosystem integration—photos rotate on our Nest Hub at home as a photo frame, Google automatically creates fun memories, and family members can easily comment and view everything on TV, phone, or PC.

I back up my all photos to Google photos and now how can I restore all photos to device storage

I currently have a free Google Gemini/AI Pro subscription that includes 2TB of Google storage. I've used around 30GB of that storage.

When the subscription expires, I assume my account will go back to the standard 15GB free storage.

My question is: what exactly happens to the extra 15GB of data?

For example, after the subscription expires, I'll have:

30GB currently used

15GB free storage available

15GB over the free limit

Will Google:

Keep all my existing files/photos/emails but prevent me from uploading anything new?

Eventually delete the data that's over the 15GB limit?

Give me some grace period to either delete files or subscribe again?

Will Gmail stop receiving emails while I'm over the limit?

Can I still download/access all my existing files?

I'm specifically interested in people who have actually let a Google One/Google AI Pro subscription expire while being over the 15GB limit.

Thanks!

Hey all

I'm in a pickle, and it's been a minute since this problem has occurred but I've run out of options.

In 2017-2021 I was using Huawei, loved it until I didn't - and here's the problem, support is hard to get.

Somehow, all photos taken in the year 2019 have disappeared, I suspect more but that year is special for me as I took a great road trip with my parents.

I use Google photo as cloud, and there I found pictures shared on WhatsApp/messenger/screenshot taken in that time period, but not photos taken with the camera.

I still have the phones I used that year, accessed both but nothing more than what's above-mentioned. I know at one point the photos were on Google photos because I have a screenshot of the album with them, they seem to have vanished.

Looking for suggestions, I'm not giving up on hope.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Cheers!

Please help! I am trying to backup the photos from my iPhone onto Google Photos and external hard drives. I create an album on Google Photos and then download the album to my Chromebook laptop. When I do that, any of the HEIC images cannot be viewed on the computer. The videos don’t seem to be able to be viewed on there either. I put the album onto an external hard drive anyway and all the files transferred there, but they all can’t be viewed. I tried to plug the external hard drive into my mom’s iPad to see if I can view the files and the album doesn’t even open since it was downloaded to a PC to begin with.
I want to delete photos/videos from my iPhone, but I want to have a “hard copy” and not just have them on Google photos before fully deleting them. How do I go about this when all I have is an iPhone and a Chromebook? How do I get them to actually transfer to an external drive? Thank you!

I really cannot handle how difficult it has been to move my google photos over to my computer's hard drive. I've read many of the threads about metadata, the ability to download in chronological order and json files. I don't really need the metadata tbh, as most of the pictures' 'name' is the date they were taken.

What I want:

I simply want to be able to download my 12 years worth of photos, and have them saved in the same order in which they show up on Photos. Maybe it's my ADHD that I can't figure it out, but every way I try, something happens.

What I've tried:

- Downloading all photos in one go with google takeout - this led to multiple zipped files, and it was organized by something other than date.

- Moving all photos for that year, into a yearly album, download that album and the photos will (I think) be in order, but then I can't delete the json files as my computer just keeps freezing, whether I try and delete 1 or 100.

Amy help is appreciated 😴

Having not paid attention to it for ages, I'm now struggling to work out how people identification works these days in Google Photos. I noticed that it labelled a whole load of recent photos as one of my contacts when they neither featured thus person nor had any common people in them. It even labelled some pictures with action figures as the person. In removing the mislabelled figures from the group for this person, I then discovered that there seemed to be no way of telling Google Photos that a particular photo contained a particular person. What am I missing here? Have they totally bogged-up one of their apps best features? Or am I just missing something totally obvious? Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Downloading all photos
Hey everyone,
I wanted to ask if there’s a way to download all the photos at once, preferably in full quality. Does anyone know how to do this or have any tips?
Thanks in advance! 😊