Help Google Photos eating up all my Rom! Am I the only one?

[jungleexplorer]

I used to use the Picasa app to automatically upload all the photos I take on my phone to Picasa web albums. Of course, google killed that and replaced it with Google Photos (GP). I like GP over all but I am having problems with the app. For some reason the app is eating up all the rom space on my phone. The data space it uses grows continually until it pretty much locks up my phone, forcing me to delete the cache data or uninstall the app. I uninstalled and reinstalled the GP app a week ago and it's up to over 430Mb of data already. Here is a screen shot.

Moving the GP app to my SD card does absolutely nothing. It still keeps everything in my ram and rom.

Am I the only one the GP app is doing this with? What can I do to fix this?

 

[lunatic59]

That seems awfully high.

Do you have a huge amount of photos or videos?

 

[jungleexplorer]

I do in my online GP account but, not on my phone. I backed up the photos on my PC to my GP account and I have quite few on my PC. But why would that make the app larger on my phone? I mean I don't even use the dang app itself. I only have it because it is the only way I have found to automatically backup the photos I take on my phone to my GP account. In PC terminology, I would say the app has a memory leak, because it is consuming memory and never releases it back to the system. Not only that, each time I clear the catch or reinstall it, I eats in to my monthly data allotment big time. I am not sure what they heck all the data is that it keeps downloading. I wish I could talk to the developers and ask them why the app needs so much data when I never ever even open the app up and use it.

 

[lunatic59]

I think it might be syncing full-res copies of your entire library back to your phone.

 

[CenturionB]

I have the same problem...

 

[jungleexplorer]

I think it might be syncing full-res copies of your entire library back to your phone.

No, I don't think that is it because there is no way they would all fit on my phone. Also, why would the app try to do that and store them in the part of the memory allocated for applications. I have 5GB of regular internal memory and 32GB of sdcard memory available, I would hope the Google programmers would be smart enough to tell the app to store full res image data in some place other the the APP memory space.

My suspicion is that the app is downloading thumbnails images of my entire library and storing them in the app memory space to make the app run faster and save data in the long run. This way when you start the app up you see thumbnails of your photos and it does not have to download them each time. It makes sense that they would design an app this way, but my problem is where they are storing this thumbnail data. They are storing it in the part of my phones memory dedicated to app installation, so once I install GP, I cannot install any other apps because it fills that space completely up. It would be just like google to design an app this way because they always create their apps in a bully like manner to trample all other apps by stealing all the fastest vital resources for themselves. If you look at the first photo I submitted, you will see that all the top resources consuming apps are made by google. If they would just allow users to choose where to store this additional downloaded data, the problem would be solved.

The problem here for me is this. I could care less about the GP app. I don't even want it. But as far as I can tell, there is no other way to have my photos automatically backed up to my google account. Before google released the GP app, i used the Picasa app and I never had this problem. I wish google would not tie their photo services to an app. Backing up your photos should be just a function of signing into you google account on your phone, the same way it is for contacts, calendar, etc, etc.

 

[Dannydet]

Try Flickr, its free, and has automatic back up with 1TB of storage.

 

[SmellyElliott]

Wow that's crazy I'm going to be checking mine and will report back

 

[jungleexplorer]

Wow that's crazy I'm going to be checking mine and will report back

Please do. I am interested in seeing if the app is doing this on other people's phones.

 

[daciat]

No, I don't think that is it because there is no way they would all fit on my phone. Also, why would the app try to do that and store them in the part of the memory allocated for applications. I have 5GB of regular internal memory and 32GB of sdcard memory available, I would hope the Google programmers would be smart enough to tell the app to store full res image data in some place other the the APP memory space.

My suspicion is that the app is downloading thumbnails images of my entire library and storing them in the app memory space to make the app run faster and save data in the long run. This way when you start the app up you see thumbnails of your photos and it does not have to download them each time. It makes sense that they would design an app this way, but my problem is where they are storing this thumbnail data. They are storing it in the part of my phones memory dedicated to app installation, so once I install GP, I cannot install any other apps because it fills that space completely up. It would be just like google to design an app this way because they always create their apps in a bully like manner to trample all other apps by stealing all the fastest vital resources for themselves. If you look at the first photo I submitted, you will see that all the top resources consuming apps are made by google. If they would just allow users to choose where to store this additional downloaded data, the problem would be solved.

The problem here for me is this. I could care less about the GP app. I don't even want it. But as far as I can tell, there is no other way to have my photos automatically backed up to my google account. Before google released the GP app, i used the Picasa app and I never had this problem. I wish google would not tie their photo services to an app. Backing up your photos should be just a function of signing into you google account on your phone, the same way it is for contacts, calendar, etc, etc.

I am solo glad to hear someone else had this problem! That I was alone??? I hate Google photos, sent thing happened to me with Google docs also. ENORMOUS amt of space noooo docs!!! But look at the new calendar n google maps? Again I've had to go STOCK cud I DON'T WANT THE EXTRA TRASH! I read comment below n I'm gonna try it! Thanks for.not making me feel like the lone ranger!!!

 

[daciat]

I'm brand new at this both posting n smartphone? I have book clue what is wrong with my stupid keyboard which seems to have mind of its own with terrible misspellings... Above.. N typing wrong passwords etc...both fb n Google are making me do security checks because my keyboard messed up n input BSD password s! Also I didn't send my first post..the keyboard... Well u know! So erratic keyboards n Google photos r on my mind this eve! O n stupid bookmark storage! Finally this site gave me an answer. Every other site n the world kept staring...well if u have CHROME!!! NO I DONT..I DISABLED IT!!! BUT THSNKS TO THIS SITE.. IVE BEEN searching FOR DAYS! Thanks

 

[rmadler]

Clear data and Cache on your Photos app. I had the same issue. This cleared it up and it never happened again.

 

[jungleexplorer]

Clearing data and catch does nothing but start the process all over and used up all my data plan for the month. But, I am running a test now. Yesterday I created a new google account just for GP, so it would not be backing up to the same account that all the photos on my PC are backed up to. I uninstalled the GP app and reinstalled it and used the new google account.

Yesterday before I uninstalled the GP app it was at 513mb. Last night after the reinstall and connection with a different account it was at 43mb. Today it is at 47mb. I'll watch it over the next few days to see if it goes up. This test will show me if the problem is with the app or if the problem is too many photos in my original google account that it was tied to.

 

[jungleexplorer]

So it's up to 49 MB today. So far my phone has uploaded about 600 of about 4000 photos and videos that are on my phone to my Google account. It looks like as my phone uploads more photos to my Google account the data used on my phone is growing. It may take a week or more to upload all the photos on my phone so, time will tell if this is the case.

 

[El Presidente]

Same thing happened to Mrs Presidentes phone. She got an error popup telling her she was running out of internal storage, gave the phone to me and Google Photos was using 5GB of storage so it was probably building up over a while.

Cleared cache and data which seemed to sort it but I suspect we'll run in to the problem again at some point.

I flashed a new ROM on my handset last night and Photos is sitting at 183MB in just over 24 hours.

 

[lunatic59]

So is there a ratio of number of photos to memory used? Right now I've got about 720 photos (1.55GB) in 5 folders and Photos (the app) is sitting at just under 40MB.

 

[jungleexplorer]

Okay, today my phone has uploaded 1180 photos to my google account. The size of the GP app data on my phone has increased to 51 MB. So, as my phone uploads more photos to this new clean google account, the data consumed on my phone increases. As I said yesterday, my phone has about six thousand photos on it. Once they are all uploaded, we will see how much data is consumed on my phone.

Again, my assumption here is that because the GP app is not only a backup app, but also a photo viewing app, I think what is happening is that the GP app is creating a thumbnail images for every photo that is stored in the Google account and storing that thumbnail image in the phones memory. This makes perfect sense that the app would do this because you would not want to have to wait to re-download all your thumbnail images each time you open the app. And think of all the data that would consume! So it makes sense, but the side effect is that, the more photos in your google account, the more thumbnail images on your phone, the greater the data consumed. For people that only have a few hundred photos like Lunatic59, that does not seem to be a problem, but for people like me that have thousands of photos, it is.

If you are like me and have (had) your phone connected to the same account that you have your PC backing up to, you may have tens of thousands of photos in your google account and it could cause the GP app to consume huge amounts of data space on your phone's internal memory. The problem with me is not that the GP app is consuming data space, because I have plenty of that. The problem on my phone is, where is is storing all this data. It is storing it in the section of internal memory dedicated for app installation. If the app would store the data on the regular internal memory or allow me to tell it store the data on my 32GB SD card, then there would not be a problem.

I will continue to update this thread as it progresses. But I think the picture is getting clear with the test I am running. The more photos in you google account, the more data consumed on your phone.

 

[jungleexplorer]

So I have been on the road a lot over the last two weeks and had not checked on GP's size for a while. Right now it's at 63 mb. I check my google account and I have 2300 photos uploaded. I'll know better once all six thousand photos are upload, but it seems like the GP app is consuming 10 mb of app memory space on my phone for every 1000 photos in my google account. If this estimate is correct, then the GP app should be around 100mb once all 6000 photos are uploaded from my phone (40mb app size + 60mb (1000 photos = 10mb).

This would explain why the app was so huge when connect to the same google account that my desktop is backed up to. There are 71,000 photos in that account. That would mean that the GP app would eat up over 700mb of app memory space if connected to that account.

I wish I could get a hold of someone at Google to confirm these speculations.