According to several Reddit users (1, 2), some Android and iOS users this past weekend noticed that some of their pictures older than five years old were looking rather strange in the Google Photos app. Some of these photos were reported to have lines, cracks, dots, and areas where the pictures looked blurry. Some users said that the photographs had the same kind of damage that you would expect to see from real photographs that have been damaged by water.
The marks on the photos became apparent once these images were downloaded. The original copies of the photos are not the ones that show the damage; only edited versions of these images contain the lines, cracks, dots, and out-of-focus areas. Reddit user “mundeth” shared a photo of what looks like a cathedral that he uploaded eight years ago. The photo has cracks running through them.
This eight-year-old photo has cracks from a Google Photos bug
His post generated two responses, from “bfmaster80” and “pjb1999.” Both of them pointed out that the same thing was happening to them. The first response said, “I’m glad it’s not just me! I have the same issue, seems to be random and on photos that were uploaded years ago.” The second response stated, “I have it too on some old photos. Not good.”
The problems with this picture are pretty obvious although we’ve circled them anyway
There is good news, however, and it is that a fix could soon be on the way. Google said on Monday, “We’re aware of the issue and are rolling out a fix. The original photos are not impacted.” When a software update will come out to exterminate the bug, we don’t know. But getting Google’s attention is the first step in the right direction and is often not so easy to do. Now that the Alphabet unit is aware, this issue could be solved shortly.
That leaves the question of why these pictures suffered from this issue in the first place. Perhaps Google will enlighten us when they send out the software update that will contain the fix for this problem. And to reiterate, this is not an Android-only problem and also affects iPhone users who use the Google Photos app.
