Google Photos turns Samsung’s motion photos into stills

Google Photos is one of the most popular and widely-used cloud photo services. But while it is functional. It can sometimes lack several wishlist features and also deals with a lot of bugs and issues sometimes whenever it rolls out an update. Now it looks like it’s affecting its compatibility with Samsung One UI’s motion photos with sound as some users noticed it turns them into just simple, still photos when you upload or back them up on Google Photos.

Samsung’s One UI version 2.5 has been rolling out for the past few months. One of the features that is part of this update is support for motion photos with sound. Android Police says that when they initially tested out Google Photos on a Galaxy S20 Ultra that was running on One UI 2.5, there seemed to be no problem with the motion photos that were uploaded to the cloud photo service. It took some time to be processed but it was supported in all its motion photo glory.

But now it looks like that support has vanished. If you upload a motion photo on Google Photos, it shows up as still images with both audio and video. This is of course a problem for those that are backing up these kinds of photos as they are expecting that the original format of their photos will be uploaded on the app. This seems to be a bug on the part of Google so hopefully, this will be resolved soon.

Google Photos actually started supporting motion photos just last year even though that format has been around for a while. So it may just be a bug that is part of their latest update and not actually removing support for this kind of photos. While it is one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways to back up your photos, it is far from perfect as some errors like random videos from other users being added to random users’ libraries affected it earlier this user.

There is no word yet from Google Photos about this issue but hopefully they’re already working on a fix for this. Meanwhile, if you’re a Samsung user with motion photos, don’t erase the original file just yet until Google is able to fix this.