Why don't my phone have a gallery?

[Janaysha Shay-Adair]

My mom got me a new phone out the blue she already had switched over so I had to redownload my apps and transfer stuff over to the new one. Well I noticed the phone didn't have a gallery but I never thought much on it and I been taking pics and couldn't find any gallery except the Google photos. I don't like Google having anything to do with my photos but they go there automatically, how do I stop that? But I couldn't make a folder for my photos or anything like that so I just downloaded this gallery app but I still can't make any folders
I guess my question is where is my gallery app on my phone?, I'm so confused.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Some phones use Google Photos as their stock gallery app. If you don't like it, you can install a 3rd party gallery app and see if you can Disable the Google Photos app. Be careful, though -- a lot of gallery apps in the Play Store have ads (unless you pay for them), and there are probably a bunch of them that have some shady behavior. One that should be pretty reliable is Focus (https://play.google.com/store/apps/...ore&pcampaignid=APPU_1_QH60XOCeHIf7vAS_yoHwBA), which was developed by a well-known ROM developer.

"Albums" in a stock gallery app are typically just separate directories on the phone's storage. So if you use a file manager app to create a new directory to put photo files in, that directory becomes a new "album." Some gallery apps can create virtual albums that keep the photo files in the same location in storage, but create their own gallery hierarchy that is only visible from within that gallery app -- I think Samsung's gallery app does that. You'd have to search the Play Store to see if any 3rd party galleries do that as well.

One of the greatest benefits of using Google Photos is the ability to back up all of your photos to your Google Photos cloud (and if you choose the High Quality setting, you get unlimited storage). This can be a lifesaver if you have precious photos that you can't afford to lose, but never bothered to store them anywhere else besides the phone, and then you drop the phone in the toilet and all of those photos are also down the toilet. I realize that some people are uncomfortable with saving personal data to any cloud, so in that case, I would strongly strongly advise you to keep your photos backed up on a regular basis (preferably to more than one backup storage device, since hard drives fail as well).