Ask HN: Photos corrupted on Google Pixel phones over time?
I have had this problem for years now: Scrolling through photos on my phone that are maybe a year old or older I notice grey squares here and there in my Google Photos app (used without an account). The files are properly corrupted - can't view them on other devices either. I checked some out in a hex editor and sure enough there is a good chunk of null bytes in the beginning. Sometimes it's just the first byte and changing it from 00 to FF fixes the image. But oftentimes it's a whole lot more 00s to the point where I don't know how to recover the image.
I've been using only Pixel a-series phones for the last couple years (3a, 6a, 9a) and had this happen on all of them. It surely can't be bad storage, can it? I feel like there is a bug in some part of Google's Android OS.
Has anyone of you encountered this issue? I can't believe I'm alone with it.
I remember reading this issue on Reddit. Some folks fixed it by installing an older version of Google Photos. I assume you have already tried the usual (deleting cache, reinstalling the app, restarting the phone, checking on the cloud through another device -- the latter might not be possible since you are using without an account).
I don't think it's an app issue once the files are borked. Since I verified there are whole chunks of data missing in the .jpg files I don't see how doing something to the photos app could fix them again.
I don't know how Google Photos stores the photos. Unless you have a backup, it is hard to see if this is a change at the level of files, or that Google Photos has a unique way of storing them that introduces changes to HDR-enabled files. As I said, I'm quoting what worked for people who faced this issue before.
I have heard of this happening before yes. But I am an iPhone user so cannot talk from personal experience.