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I am testing out Google Photos. For the most part, it works nicely. It even integrates reasonably well with Google Drive, as advertised (I can view Drive photos in Google Photos and vice versa)

However, when I delete a photo from Google Drive, a problem arises. The photo is removed from photos.google.com, but if it happens to exist locally on my Android device, it is not deleted (as it should be). It still appears in Google Photos on my device.

Is this a bug within Google, or does anyone have a fix for this?

For clarification, here's an example workflow with the problem:

  1. Take two photos, A and B from my Android phone, which has Google Photos app
  2. After a few moments, A and B appear on photos.google.com and also in Google Drive > Google Photos
  3. On phone, select photo A and choose "delete device copy"
  4. From Google Drive, select A and B and delete both*
  5. After a few moments, both A and B are removed from photos.google.com. However, photo B remains on my phone. It should not.

*Note: if this step was instead "From photos.google.com, select A and B and delete both" then the result would be both photos deleted from my phone. This is the behaviour I would expect, and the fact that Drive yields a different behaviour seems erroneous.

fixer1234
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susie derkins
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    I wanted to add that I just noticed something tangentially related. If a photo is in an album in photos.google.com and is then deleted from Google Drive, the photo is NOT deleted from photos.google.com or synced app on device. – susie derkins Mar 25 '17 at 02:34
  • Just remove it from the album and it will be delete from photos.google.com – Akira Yamamoto Jul 22 '17 at 12:33

1 Answers1

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My understanding is that is by design, unless you explicitly delete a photo from your android phone it stays. Think of Google Photos as a backup service, they are trying to backup your photos from your phone to the cloud to free up space on your mobile phone and allow shareing ...

With back up & sync turned on, you can delete local copies from your mobile device but keep cloud copies saved in your Google Photos library.

Google Photo help

GeraldB
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    I believe your first sentence is partially incorrect: photos can indeed be deleted from phone without explicitly doing so on the phone. Example: if my step #4 was "From photos.google.com, select A and B and delete both" the result would be both photos removed from my phone. The behaviour when deleting from Google Drive is different than when deleting from photos.google.com. You are right that it _may_ be a feature; to me it feels like a bug. I would expect the same behaviour. – susie derkins Sep 11 '15 at 23:02