Google photos app is driving me crazy. It's sapping my battery and acting strange

[B. Diddy]

It's fixed. It might have actually been something on the server side, but either way, it isn't draining like crazy any more on my Nexus 6P.

 

[Serkle K]

Thanks. I'll give it a shot tonight.

 

[LeoRex]

Yes... it seems that there was an update pushed out that affected how the Photos app connects to and refreshes its information with the server. It would 'phone home', but then things went to hell. Not sure if there was an update to the indexing system or what, but most operations would either fail or hang, and this would sometimes throw a nasty wakelock that wouldn't clear itself.

But they did push out an app update and I haven't seen the issue in quite a while.

 

[Serkle K]

Thanks! I haven't had a chance to run updates in a few days, so I'll try to go to them tonight.

 

[Misterb]

Happy to report that the latest version seems to have fixed the problems. Thanks everyone

 

[posaune76]

I'm having this issue, and I'm on version 2.3.0 (10/31/16 update). I've tried unistalling updates & going to what came from the factory on my S7 Edge; choosing to sync only while charging; and turning off sync entirely. I've done all of these in various combinations with both the factory version and the latest update.

I let the app sync all photos on my phone initially, which took about 8 hours and chewed through the battery. But I understand that. Since then I've been uploading old photos from my computer, but that shouldn't be an issue if sync is off. Plan was to upload, then sync everything overnight while charging, then live life on automatic backup. Now I'm not so sure.

 

[posaune76]

Solved. I think.

I updated to the latest version (2.4.0.13....). Sideloaded from apkmirror. Link is for 11/14 update; I did this yesterday, so it was the version prior.

I have multiple Google accounts on my phone. Using the left-side menu, I selected and then removed each of the accounts I wouldn't be syncing with Photos. This left 1 account available in the Photos app. Synced overnight while charging, and no extraordinary drain so far today (11:00am). It shows up near the top of my battery use chart because I've been in it, but just sitting around not using the phone, no more apparent untoward drain.

 

[posaune76]

Spoke too soon. :-(

 

[murtazaqz]

I had the same problem over the last few days and was driving me mad. I rolled back Google photos to the previous version and now the battery drain has been resolved. I left a review mentioning it on the play store and then saw lots of people saying the same thing!

How do you just roll back to a previous version?

 

[jejb]

How do you just roll back to a previous version?

Go to the app in App Manager, go to More in the upper right corner and choose Uninstall Updates.