Google Photos app - high battery impact

[sparksd]

Over the last several days I've seen larger than expected battery usage when my S2 (Nougat) was sleeping (10% rundown as opposed to usual 1% at most overnight). Both Gsam and the built-in usage monitor indicated significant CPU usage by the Photos app, this even though I haven't used the app for some time nor I have I added new pictures or media to the device. I tried clearing cache and data but that had no effect so I disabled it. Problem fixed. I use QuickPic Pro for picture management so I don't miss it but I was wondering if others had seen similar behavior. I don't see it on my Galaxy S7 Edge.

 

[br77494]

Over the last several days I've seen larger than expected battery usage when my S2 (Nougat) was sleeping (10% rundown as opposed to usual 1% at most overnight). Both Gsam and the built-in usage monitor indicated significant CPU usage by the Photos app, this even though I haven't used the app for some time nor I have I added new pictures or media to the device. I tried clearing cache and data but that had no effect so I disabled it. Problem fixed. I use QuickPic Pro for picture management so I don't miss it but I was wondering if others had seen similar behavior. I don't see it on my Galaxy S7 Edge.

I've had this same thing happen to me on my Mate 9. It was actually probably worse, as I was seeing battery usages of over 25%. I tried everything I could think of....including all the things you tried, and just force stopping the app (which worked until the I either opened the app or re-started). Nothing seemed to permantly fix the issue until.... I took all the photos off my sd card directory - saving them to my desktop hard drive - and started with a fresh, clean photos directory on the SD card. That solved it! Someone told me that once in a while some part of an image file might get corrupted and that apparently drives Google Photos crazy trying to work on it. Everthing is back to normal now. Let me know if this works for you.

 

[sparksd]

I've had this same thing happen to me on my Mate 9. It was actually probably worse, as I was seeing battery usages of over 25%. I tried everything I could think of....including all the things you tried, and just force stopping the app (which worked until the I either opened the app or re-started). Nothing seemed to permantly fix the issue until.... I took all the photos off my sd card directory - saving them to my desktop hard drive - and started with a fresh, clean photos directory on the SD card. That solved it! Someone told me that once in a while some part of an image file might get corrupted and that apparently drives Google Photos crazy trying to work on it. Everthing is back to normal now. Let me know if this works for you.

Yeah, I considered that (shades of mediaservice going bonkers) but decided against cleaning as I have multiple GBs of photo and video media on the installed 256GB card and as I was never using the the Photos app anyways, deleting it was easier.

 

[chanchan05]

I always disable Photos as soon as I get a device. It's too much of a battery hog and I use OneDrive anyway.

As to how to fix, you can still have your photos backup online without Google Photos. OneDrive and Dropbox work. DBox I think has less battery drain. Not sure on OD since I use scheduled sync via Foldersync to upload the photos in a custom folder configuration per album instead of the OneDrive app. I don't like how DB, OD and Photos ignore my phone's albums in their backups, so I set Foldersync to duplicate my photo album folders when backing up to OneDrive.

 

[sparksd]

I always disable Photos as soon as I get a device. It's too much of a battery hog and I use OneDrive anyway.

As to how to fix, you can still have your photos backup online without Google Photos. OneDrive and Dropbox work. DBox I think has less battery drain. Not sure on OD since I use scheduled sync via Foldersync to upload the photos in a custom folder configuration per album instead of the OneDrive app. I don't like how DB, OD and Photos ignore my phone's albums in their backups, so I set Foldersync to duplicate my photo album folders when backing up to OneDrive.

As I said, I use QuickPic Pro for photo viewing, etc. All photos on my S2 come from other storage and are already duplicated elsewhere so I never have backup for them enabled.

 

[chanchan05]

As I said, I use QuickPic Pro for photo viewing, etc. All photos on my S2 come from other storage and are already duplicated elsewhere so I never have backup for them enabled.

I wouldn't let QuickPic within 10ft of my devices. That thing has been taken over by admitted data miners and resellers (Cheetah Mobile).

 

[sparksd]

I wouldn't let QuickPic within 10ft of my devices. That thing has been taken over by admitted data miners and resellers (Cheetah Mobile).

Good info that I was unaware of - thanks! QuickPic is now deleted and I'm giving Piktures a try.