Losing vacation photos is not like accidentally deleting a work email. Those photos are irreplaceable: that sunset, that expression, a moment that will never return. And discovering they’re lost due to an unexpected behavior of an app you’ve used for years, thinking you understood how it worked, the anger mixes with frustration.
Google Photos Deletes Copies When Photos Are Deleted – Why?
That’s exactly what happened to a Reddit user who, after a trip, tried to organize photos on their Pixel 8 Pro using Google Photos. The result? All the photos were lost. Not due to a system crash or a bug, but because of Google Photos’ behavior.
The story begins innocently enough. The user returns from a trip with a phone full of photos. They want to organize them, move them to a specific folder, and then transfer them to a computer or archive them somewhere. A simple operation that anyone who has ever used a file manager has done hundreds of times.
They open the “Files by Google” app to move the images, but the app struggles, freezes, and doesn’t respond as it should. They open Google Photos, select the images, and use the internal sharing function to copy them to the Downloads folder. Two copies of the same file: one in the camera directory, one in Downloads. A cross-check with Files confirms both are present. Everything seems normal.
At this point, the user decides to keep only those in Downloads and deletes the originals from the camera folder. They return to Google Photos, select the original photos, and move them to the trash. And that’s when disaster strikes: the copies in Downloads also disappear.
When Intelligence Becomes Stupidity…
Google Photos, with its own logic, decided that deleting a photo means deleting all copies present on the device. It doesn’t matter if they were saved in different folders or duplicated specifically to preserve them.
There is, in theory, a warning. When a photo is moved to the trash, a message appears saying something like “it will be removed from all folders.” A vague warning, easy to ignore, that doesn’t explain exactly what “all folders” means. And if you select “Delete from device” instead of “Move to trash,” the warning doesn’t appear at all.
Google assumes that “delete from device” means “delete from any corner of the phone where this image might exist.” A logical interpretation, but not for normal human beings. If you make a copy of a file in another folder, that copy is independent of the original. If you delete the original, the copy remains. But for Google Photos, the traditional rules don’t apply…
This behavior likely stems from good intentions. Google wants to avoid users ending up with dozens of duplicate copies of the same file, which unnecessarily occupies space and creates confusion. It wants to simplify photo management, making everything cleaner and more organized.
The problem is that in trying to be helpful, Google Photos becomes intrusive. It makes decisions on behalf of the user without clearly explaining the consequences. And when users discover this behavior, usually after losing important files, it’s too late.
Those Using Backups Are (Relatively) Safe
There is one category of users who will never have this problem: those who use Google Photos’ automatic cloud backup. If the photos are synchronized with the cloud, even if all local files are accidentally deleted, they can always be recovered from the online trash within 60 days.
But not everyone uses cloud backup. Some prefer to manage their files manually, others don’t want to rely on cloud services for privacy or cost reasons, and some simply find it more convenient to transfer photos to their computer via USB cable every now and then instead of entrusting them to remote servers. For these users – and You’ll see many – Google Photos is a minefield. The app behaves as if cloud backup is active even when it isn’t.
What to Do to Avoid Losing Everything
The simplest solution is not to use Google Photos to delete files if you manage manual copies, but to use the phone’s file manager directly, which treats files as independent entities. If you really want to use Google Photos to organize images, it’s best to make sure you have cloud backup enabled.
