Users of Google Photos, the tech giant’s service to back up and share pictures, are reporting that older images have been corrupted, with discoloration, lines, and other artefacts appearing on old photos.
The bug appears to be affecting images from 2014 and earlier, with some users reporting issues with images that date back to 2002. In a statement, Google said it was rolling out a fix.
Via Android Police:
As spotted by Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii, a few people have taken to the Google Support forums and Reddit to complain about the problem. The reports first started popping up about two days ago, and all of the affected images share similar damage. There are seemingly random lines and dots of missing pixels, replaced by either black or white pixels at random. Most of these artifacts form random-looking lines, like there is just missing data for a few points in the photos. The shapes and forms created this way look almost artistic, but of course, this is probably not what you want your precious memories to look like.
The good news is that the issues have been resolved automatically for some people already. On their end, they can’t see the artifacts anymore.
Others who were not so lucky to get an automatic treatment were able to get rid of the artifacts by clearing the cache of the Photos app and opening the affected images again and then see error-free versions.
In a statement provided to 9to5Google, the company said “we’re aware of the issue and are rolling out a fix. The original photos are not impacted.”
Cloud services like Google Photos should not be relied on as a backup for personal files, most of all the family memories captured by photos. The best and safest backup option is an external hard drive or USB thumb drive that is store in a safe location.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.