How do you save photos directly to google photos and not directly to gallery?

[Android Central Question]

I have a Samsung Note 8. Everytime I download a photo from the internet or save it from social media, the photo will not be found on Google photos and instead only on gallery. Though when I take pictures with the camera they appear in both.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! The main Google Photos feed shows the photos in your Camera roll (i.e., photos in the /DCIM/Camera directory, which is where the Camera app saves photos) as well as any photos that were backed up to your Google Photos in the cloud. You can see other photos in the Google Photos app by swiping in from the left and tapping Device Folders -- then you can see other folders like Screenshots, Hangouts, and others that apps may create to save images to. The photos you're saving from the internet or from social media are likely going to one of those non-Camera folders, and therefore don't show up in the main Photos feed.

 

[Rukbat]

As far as "saving files to gallery", you don't. Gallery is an app, not a storage location, and you can't save data (any data - pictures, sounds, the entire US Social Security database - that's all "data") to an app, you can only save it to storage. It gets displayed by an app. So any pictures you download to the phone, after restarting the phone usually, will be displayed by Gallery, the Photos app and any other similar app, but, as B. Diddy said, only pictures in /DCIM/Camera get synced to the Google Photos cloud.