How to Keep Your Samsung Motion Photos From This Google Photos Error
Isn’t it fun when technologies from one platform don’t mix with another? Owners of various Samsung Android devices are experiencing this joy first hand, as Samsung’s moving camera photos don’t seem to work with Google Photos, the popular, free and wonderful photo backup solution.
The odd thing is that this hasn’t been a problem before , according to Android Police . Samsung’s motion photography isn’t exactly a new technology, and Google Photos started supporting it around mid-2019. However, try uploading it to Google Photos now and you might run into problems.
I tested this on myself using a Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (with One UI 2.5, which includes audio in moving photos) and can confirm that Google Photos is not a fan of Samsung’s moving images. They upload to Google Photos just fine – or at least appear to be at first glance. I let Google “process” them for almost an hour, and it still couldn’t display the “moving” part of the image. I can load a still image, but the motion is not working and I cannot load a video with a moving image.
While I suspect most people don’t really care about photos with an arbitrary few seconds of movement in front of them, it’s worth knowing that Google won’t be able to process them at this time. In other words, if some kind of disaster strikes and you need access to those photos again – with traffic – Google won’t be able to help you. What then is to be done?
Try a backup alternative that keeps Samsung moving photos
The easiest solution is to switch to using the built-in Samsung Gallery app, which allows you to sync photos to OneDrive. Then you can install OneDrive on your desktop or laptop, find the photos, and store them anywhere, including another cloud service if you so desire. If you go down this route, make sure you choose a service that just stores raw files (like Dropbox or Google One ) and not one that converts or processes images in any way.
Why? As long as the raw .JPG file is stored somewhere without issue, the file still contains all of the saved motion preceding the still image. It sounds strange, but listen to me: your operating system won’t be able to show you a moving image, like no cloud service I discovered, but as long as the file is not corrupted in any way, you I could re-download it again, drop it on my Samsung phone and see the image – with movement.
I tried this by copying the .JPG files containing motion video from my Samsung phone to the desktop via Windows 10 explorer. Then I deleted the files from my Samsung phone, checked the Gallery app to make sure they were gone and copied them back to your phone. I checked the Gallery app again and there they are, movement and all.
Microsoft’s OneDrive gives you five gigabytes of free storage, a decent amount of space, at least for hosting your moving images in the cloud. From there, what you do with them is your business. To customize this setting, open the Samsung Gallery app and tap the three-dot icon in the middle right. Click on “Settings” and then click on “Cloud Sync” to start the process of connecting your Microsoft account to your Samsung phone.
After going through the sign-in process, return to the same screen and make sure “Sync with OneDrive ” is turned on. Then tap on that option and then tap “Sync Now” on the next screen. (Once launched, it will change to “Click here to stop syncing.”)
Your images should now be copied to OneDrive. Sit back and enjoy the wait, depending on how long you’ve used your device’s camera. And yes, the process will sync all your images. You can’t just choose “movement only” or something.
You can also save moving photo videos separately
If you don’t want to mess with this option, however convenient it is, you have another choice. Pull out a moving photo in the gallery, click on “view moving photo” at the bottom, click on the video when it starts, and click on “Save Video” in the upper right corner. This will copy the video snippet of your image into a separate .MP4 file, which can then be backed up to a service like Google Photos like any other video.
Of course, this is an inelegant solution since you have now decoupled the motion from the original image (which still has motion integrated, in case you want to continue watching on your Samsung). At least it will let you down a bit while Google is hopefully working on a fix.