Not all thumbnails show in Google Photos when offline

[krauster]

This is my latest strategy on my Note4. I have an SD card but I am not using it to store photos in the Gallery. I am using the 64G card for music. I have the Gallery on the Phone. I am using Google Photos.

When I take a photo it goes into the Gallery and I believe that Google Photos takes it and eventually (when I am on Wifi) sends it to the Google cloud and then distributes it as a cloud based service to the other devices like my computers, where those photos become viewable via the photos.google.com in the browser.

Once it is in Google Photos on the phone I use Google Photos to manage the photos, using it to do deletes that remove it from Google Photos and the Gallery. To save space on the phone I can even delete items in the Gallery that I want to keep in Google Photos on the cloud. Google Photos in the cloud becomes the place where I am storing everything and I don't worry that I have deleted photos from the phone's Gallery.

I also can see everything as thumbnails through the Google Photos app on the phone. But I have a few thousand photos and when I scroll through the thumbnails it is not being refreshed very fast to show all of the thumbnails. There are lots of white blank areas indicating placeholders for the images.

How can get the complete Google Photos on to my phone, preferably on to the SD card? I've read that it is cached which by definition means temporary, and apparently incomplete.

 

[Newalpost]

I can't answer your question completely but I've been playing with the new Google Photo app and noticed the following.

When in the Photos page, initially it will display only those images that are in the Pictures folder and not other folders. When you choose Device Folders you can see images from other folders but you need to backup and sync these before they become available in the main Photos window.

Now when Off-line I noticed that all my thumbnails where missing i.e just a grey box. Tapping one of this gave the message - media not available. Going On- line filled in these missing thumbnails and the images became available to view.

Now what I'd done in between was to use CCleaner to free up some space and it cleared all the thumbnails away. Going on-line rebuilt these.

But what I've also noticed is that when off-line, and even with all the thumbnails present, tapping an image produces a pixelated view and not the original. If I use another viewer the original is sharp. I'm about to post this as a seperate question.