People are Disappearing from Photos and Albums, But a Fix is Coming

BY GreenBot Staff

Published 17 Apr 2017

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We’ve become accustomed to Google adding features and interface tweaks to improve the photos app constantly. But over the weekend. It might have seemed like one of the most-used features changed for the worse. But rest assured, it’s just a bug, and Google is already working on squashing it.

Over on the Photos support forum. Numerous users had noted that their people albums were less populated than they once were. According to the posters, the problem wasn’t affecting the photos themselves but rather how the algorithm sorted them. When they went into the automatically generated people folder to find collected pictures of their friend’s kids. New photos weren’t added to an existing album or sorted into a new one. And in some cases, albums that were there before had disappeared. The problem affects all instances of Photos across iOS, Android, and the web.

At first, moderators suggested checking the Face grouping toggle settings. Still, an employee quickly chimed in to set the record straight. According to consultants, a Photos community manager was aware of this, and the team is looking into it. And promised to post information in various threads when it was fixed. The problem seems limited in scope, but if you’re one of the affected users, stay tuned to the Photos forum for updates. The big picture: Bugs and issues are a fact of life of apps, especially when dealing with millions of users with countless files, but this is relatively benign. Thankfully, due to the issue no photos were damaged or wiped. It’s mainly a matter of convenience. Still, Google handled it correctly by admitting a problem and promising a speedy fix.