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

[Misterb]

I have tried all sorts of different settings. Nothing helps. I also removed updates, updated it, rebooted... nothing. Tried disabling and doing a force stop. Still kills my battery. Removed and updated a Google Play Services, but I'm still having issues with it.

Any ideas what to do? I usually like this program for doing backups of my pictures, but this is getting very annoying

 

[japhule]

Is it currently draining your battery b/c it's backing up a lot of pictures to the cloud? Or has it constantly been draining your battery, regardless whether its backing up your files or not? If you haven't already, you can set Photos to backup only while charging only under the settings.

 

[ABOSWORTH007]

Is it currently draining your battery b/c it's backing up a lot of pictures to the cloud? Or has it constantly been draining your battery, regardless whether its backing up your files or not? If you haven't already, you can set Photos to backup only while charging only under the settings.

This... I set mine to only backup when I'm charging. I had it disabled on previous S4 and S5 models because it was annoying me and I just did manual backups but now I use it and I don't notice any annoying behavior. If it's draining your battery, I bet it's still trying to backup photos. Once it catches up, it shouldn't drain at all if you have it set to only backup while charging.

 

[Misterb]

Supposedly, it's done doing the backup (sync icons are gone), but for some reason it's still using resources, and I've tried the option of only uploading while charging.

 

[B. Diddy]

Do you have photos saved to the SD card, or only internal storage? If they're on the SD, there's more chance of a corrupted file. This usually causes Mediaserver to work overtime (which can cause battery drain), but I wonder if it might also show up as Google Photos battery use.

 

[103Softail]

Ditch Google photos & use the default Samsung gallery. Turn off Samsung backup for photos. Store them all on micro sd card. Copy them regularly from card to pc.

 

[Misterb]

My photos are on SD. That said, I have since turned off sync in Google photos. I also booted in to safe mode and deleted the cache. Charged the phone to 100% and have left it off the charger for 21 minutes. Guess what? I'm down to 97%, and it shows that Google photos has used 100% of my battery! Damn, how do I get rid of this? I'm fine not even using the program for now, but no matter what I try to kill it, it keeps coming back

 

[ABOSWORTH007]

My photos are on SD. That said, I have since turned off sync in Google photos. I also booted in to safe mode and deleted the cache. Charged the phone to 100% and have left it off the charger for 21 minutes. Guess what? I'm down to 97%, and it shows that Google photos has used 100% of my battery! Damn, how do I get rid of this? I'm fine not even using the program for now, but no matter what I try to kill it, it keeps coming back

Maybe try disabling Google photos via app manager if it's causing that much trouble.

 

[Danred1]

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!

 

[Misterb]

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!

Thank you! I will try that and see how it works. That said, how do I keep it from just updating itself with the rest of my apps, after I roll back to the original version?

 

[Danred1]

I thought mine would do the same thing but it just sits there saying update. I'm intending to just ignore it. Might update it in a few days to see if it was just me and something went wrong when I did the update the first time.

 

[Misterb]

I thought mine would do the same thing but it just sits there saying update. I'm intending to just ignore it. Might update it in a few days to see if it was just me and something went wrong when I did the update the first time.

I reverted and reinstalled the latest update a couple days ago, and it didn't help. I'm hoping reverting and just disabling it without installing the new version will take care of it

 

[B. Diddy]

Since the photos are on the SD, check to see if there's any file corruption. Go to Settings>Storage, Unmount the card, remove it, and insert it into your computer. Can the computer read these files? Backup as much as you can right now, then run chkdsk to look for bad sectors: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...guide-using-chkdsk-fix-corrupted-sd-card.html

 

[Misterb]

Since the photos are on the SD, check to see if there's any file corruption. Go to Settings>Storage, Unmount the card, remove it, and insert it into your computer. Can the computer read these files? Backup as much as you can right now, then run chkdsk to look for bad sectors: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...guide-using-chkdsk-fix-corrupted-sd-card.html

Good idea.

I'm happy to report that since reverting to the original version of the software, and disabling it, my battery has been normal

 

[Danred1]

I've deleted all photos off my SD card, everything uploaded on to photos now and updated the app to the latest version and so far everything is working smoothly with no drain.

 

[103Softail]

Do you have Dropbox app? That may be on auto upload

 

[ericf4]

same here, i don't even have google photo backing up any of my pics as i do that to one drive,,,,And still its killing my battery since last update.....

 

[Serkle K]

I noticed between yesterday and this morning that my battery was draining kind of fast for not really using my Note 7. And then I found this thread, and I uninstalled Google Photo for now. It seems to have stabilized my battery after a reboot and no indication of the app trying to open or run.

 

[B. Diddy]

The bug just hit me this morning as well. The Google Play Store page for the Google Photos app has quite a few reviews citing the battery drain. I uninstalled updates, and will wait until the next update (the current one is dated 10/12/16).

 

[Serkle K]

Anyone know if it's safe to update Google Photo's yet?

I haven't updated it since I got my S7E because of the battery issues it was giving me with my N7.

I keep getting prompted to update it.