Hi. I have been trying to figure this out for a long time. I even posted in the google support forums and got a bunch of bogus answers.
There is a sync option for google photos under settings>accounts>google. There is also a backup and sync option in the photos app itself. My understanding is that backup and sync in the photos app will sync my photos to the cloud, and any changes made will synchronize between my phone and the cloud. What does the google photo sync option do under account settings?
I have tested this extensively....I used my wife's phone to sign into my google account. I turned backup and sync on (in the photos app) on MY phone so a few pics would go to the cloud, and then made sure I shut it off on both phones. The pics appeared on my wifes phone under photos once they were in the cloud, even though I had backup and sync turned off on both phones in the google photos app. I also checked and made sure the sync option under google account sync was off. I then tried deleting a pic on my phone, and sure enough, it deleted it from my wifes phone. I found this odd so turned off ALL sync options, even app data, in my wife's phone and tried deleting another pic on my phone. Sure enough, it deleted on her phone. I also tried turning backup and sync on in the photos app on my phone, and still had ALL sync options off on my wifes phone. Her phone got the pics as soon as they went to the cloud.
Even more interesting: When I turn backup and sync on in the photos app, then go to the sync options under google account, there are TWO options - google photos, and google photos backup!? When backup and sync are on in the photos app, the switch for google photos backup under google account gets turned on, but the google photos switch remains off. This proves that this google photos sync switch is separate than the backup and sync in the photos application. BUT WHAT DOES IT DO and why are photos syncing to my wife's phone, even when I have ALL sync and backup options turned off???
I am so frustrated with google lately and the way they have over-complicated everything. I've rooted plenty of phones and am not a newbie to this stuff so I don't understand how the average person is expected to make sense of this craziness. They offer no support except the google support forum, and I got a bunch of answers there that I could quickly disprove were true.
Not sure if this will help you but it might be worth checking out. Good luck.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/13/ye...ll-sync-your-photos-after-you-delete-the-app/
http://www.androidcentral.com/stop-syncing-google-photos
As I understand it, switching on photo backup in Google Photos activates the backup service, but when you uninstall the app the backup permissions remain and the phone continues to send your photos to the cloud even though you probably (as I did...) think that by removing the app you stopped the backups. Er... no, you didn't. You have to use the Google Settings to stop it.
In my very humble opinion, a devious and underhand piece of trickery, even if Google didn't intend it as such.
Related
I've searched and searched and can't find any threads talking quite about the issue I'm having. I'm not having an issue with the sync on my contacts working, but in fact, I need them deleted. I need to delete my contacts from Google's cloud and VZ Backup's cloud.
I'm using a stock VZ GS3 (Not that it should matter) and when I imported all of my contacts from my previous phone, I wound up with around 1100 contacts, when I actually only have around 250, they quadrupled. All of my backups synced the copies, and now, I've went through and manually deleted the extras twice, but the clouds keep restoring them all!
I know for Verizon Backup Assistant, you go to their website, login, yata yata yata and it should allow me to delete my cloud contacts, only issue
with that being is that it shows no contacts backed up.
With Google, something terribly dumb has happened, and rather than syncing all of my contacts as listed people, all of my contacts restore as unassigned groups. I can access all of the contact info, and even delete them directly from the cloud, but the issue there is it takes about 4 clicks to delete an unassigned group, and if the group is "unassigned," it can only be done one group at a time.... I have 1100 of these on my phone. -_-
Thanks!
So I transferred photos from my old phone to my new Android phone (galaxy s5) and I noticed I have 2 photo apps, gallery and photos. I also noticed that when in gallery it asks to sync to somewhere (SNS DATA MANAGEMENT - SYNC VIA WIFI ONLY). I went and turned off all syncing after I saw that.
My question is where are my photos going? They getting synced to Google+? I don't want my photos anywhere besides my phone. I checked my google + and didn't see any photos. But then what is this sync via wifi only all about then?
Grey Hawk said:
So I transferred photos from my old phone to my new Android phone (galaxy s5) and I noticed I have 2 photo apps, gallery and photos. I also noticed that when in gallery it asks to sync to somewhere (SNS DATA MANAGEMENT - SYNC VIA WIFI ONLY). I went and turned off all syncing after I saw that.
My question is where are my photos going? They getting synced to Google+? I don't want my photos anywhere besides my phone. I checked my google + and didn't see any photos. But then what is this sync via wifi only all about then?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
the auto backup feature does backup to google+ but they are private until you change the sharing option
joanthanmajh said:
the auto backup feature does backup to google+ but they are private until you change the sharing option
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And the auto backup feature is optional and, for me at least, defaulted to being disabled.
HI. I'm guessing this has been discussed before, but I can't find a good answer to my problem. I got the Galaxy S7 on April 1, and my Contacts have failed to sync ever since. I have 1,141 contacts in Google. Currently, only 169 of them appear on my phone, and I lose contacts on my phone... daily. I have tried everything on the phone itself, followed the advice on several advice forums, removed Gmail, undid and redid sync settings multiple 100 times... cleared cache, blah, blah, blah... and after visiting the AT&T store yesterday for help, things are only worse. Contacts that I've had in various phones and synced back/forth for nearly 20 years have disappeared. I have some faith because everybody still exists in Google on my laptop and I've gotta believe there's a way to get them to appear on my phone. But... this is driving me crazy! Please help!
I had a similar problem the other day, after a strange bug that mixed up all my contacts numbers, I tried syncing and it refused, only way I could get it to sync was to manually delete all contacts on the phone
Problem then was when it synced, it synced Phone > Gmail, so it deleted all my Gmail contacts too, luckily I had exported them all to .CSV first
Imported them back into Gmail, and the phone then synced properly
So first of all, if you are going to try this, Export your Gmail contacts from contacts.google.com first because it is likely going to do the same thing as mine
Other options is to import them from gmail to outlook, and install the outlook app, that seems to sync contacts fine to the S7
Google Contact Sync Issues
So, I have exported all in Google to a CSV. However, the contacts I CAN see on my phone are not in the exported file (this is so F*&ked up)... I exported them to the SIM, but... do you supposed I can import them from the SIM to Contacts, if I delete all Contacts from the phone now?
I wonder if there's a conflict between Samsung Cloud storage and Google?
What do I do next?
Sounds like contacts you have added since the sync failed, have only been stored on he phone
If you long press one of you contacts on the phone, the hit the "Select all" button at the top left, you should see a "Share" option on the top right
Share it to your email, it'll generate a .VCF file that you should be able to import back in once things are sorted
Google v Samsung Cloud
I was able to restore 1271 contacts (more than show in Google on the desktop) by changing a setting in the Samsung Cloud app: see 2 screenshots, below. I've literally been battling this for 7 months now; canNOT believe I did it just now. There's a battle between the clouds; seems like something Samsung should resolve. Grrr.
pbparker13 said:
I was able to restore 1271 contacts (more than show in Google on the desktop) by changing a setting in the Samsung Cloud app: see 2 screenshots, below. I've literally been battling this for 7 months now; canNOT believe I did it just now. There's a battle between the clouds; seems like something Samsung should resolve. Grrr.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Pleased you got it sorted, I disabled the Samsung cloud sync completely and still had no luck so I guess it was a different problem for me
Anyway, always good to have an Exported backup of your contacts for when things go wrong
Maybe this has been covered before. Google Photos automatically uploads my photos to the cloud after a certain period of time. That's fine. However what is not fine is that it keeps deleting photos from my phone at some point after they have been uploaded. I continually have to open Photos and download (1 at a time) photos that I want to stay on my phone. How can i stop this? All I see is an option to sync and/or upload them. I want the uploads to take place, I just don't want them automatically deleted from my phone. Never had this issue with any phone before including the Nexus 5.
Note, I have disabled Smart Storage.
Apparently, I am not the only one to notice this. For whatever reason, Google Support closed this thread with no solution.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/560768?hl=en
Thanks
Anyone?
No one can tell you of an option that does not exist. You sync them they will get uploaded and off your phone. For me this is why I turned sync off, google is not readily available where I am. You could chose a time that is convenient and sync all then re-download. Maybe a weekly or monthly thing, I think tasker or automate could do that.
I disagree. I think this is a bug. I have turned Smart Storage off so photos should not be getting removed from my phone. Did you look at that Google Support link I posted?
Update: This may only be happening to downloaded photos and not those taken with the phone camera. I am not sure if this is intentional or a bug. If they are still being uploaded to the Google servers and taking up space there, I don't see why Google would care what remains on my phone.
Uncheck this option from the storage settings and your problem is solved.
Okay sorry misread that you already done rhis
With Android 11, Google seems to have taken yet another step in the "making Android increasingly painful to use" direction by disabling the ability for device-only contacts to be available via the standard Contacts Provider. Because of this, I have to use Google-stored contacts on my Android 11 device in order for these contacts to be available to my apps. Otherwise, my apps don't see any contacts.
I have a rooted Android 11 device, and I'm hoping that there is some way that I could disable the standard Contacts Provider service and that I could then install an alternate, custom Contacts Provider service which knows how to access device-only contacts, and which knows how to make these contacts available to all apps that need contacts ... and which never will try to store my contacts on any of Google's servers nor anywhere else in the cloud.
Is it possible to disable Android's standard Contacts Provider service? And does such a 3rd-party Contacts Provider service exist?
Thank you in advance for any thoughts and suggestions.
Well, I think I found a solution to the issue that I'm trying to solve. And it doesn't require any new Contacts Provider service to be installed, after all.
First of all, I made sure that contacts syncing is turned off.
Next, I installed the "True Phone" contacts and phone manager app from the play store and made it my default phone app.
Then, I used that program to make a local backup of my contacts, which is one of its capabilities.
Following that, I froze the Contacts app, but I kept the Contacts Storage app active. I checked the permissions for the Contacts Storage app, and I see now that it has no network-related permssions. So apparently, it just looks at the local contacts database, and some other piece of software is what actually syncs Google's cloud-based contacts data with the local database. And by turning off contacts sync-ing, it seems like I have indeed disabled that process.
Then, I went from my desktop computer to http://contacts.google.com with the same login credentials that are associated with my Android device. I then permanently deleted all of the contacts there.
(I rebooted my Android device between each of these steps and also after the final step.)
Now, my SMS and phone apps still see the contacts info in my local database. And I can manage the local contacts backup and restore via that True Phone app.
There are probably other phone/contacts apps which also could be used for this. But True Phone works well enough for me.
So ... it turns out that no OS surgery is needed to mess with the contacts nor to install an alternate Contacts Provider service.
PS: And I now have learned something. I was asking about a "Contacts Provider service", but I now realize that the standard Contacts Storage app itself seems to be the "Contacts Provider".
And because I found out that this app does not even have network permissions, it seems clear that this app simply gets contacts from the locally stored sqlite contacts database, and therefore, I don't need to replace this app with anything else.
And so all I needed to do was disable contacts sync-ing, because that is what would sync contacts between Google's cloud and the local contacts database.
How long were you playing with it to get to this point? Fun times...
Cloud apps can be little terrors, the only one I use is Gmail. It's never been breached by malware in over 15 years. Lol, Outlook not so much so.
blackhawk said:
How long were you playing with it to get to this point? Fun times...
Cloud apps can be little terrors, the only one I use is Gmail. It's never been breached by malware in over 15 years. Lol, Outlook not so much so.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It took me around a day of on-and-off playing around sessions to figure this all out ... with some input from a few other helpful souls.
I agree about cloud-based services. I don't even use gmail. I run my own email server, so I use that to manage all my email accounts. I manage my own web servers and my own DNS servers, as well.
It's more work for me to manage those things, but I don't mind, and I actually enjoy that work, most of the time.