Google Photos is now reportedly backing up RAW images by default

Google Photos is now reportedly backing up RAW images by default،

Google has reportedly made a change to the Google Photos app, which is widely used on Android and iOS devices. The change concerns how the app handles RAW files on Android devices and could have a significant impact on its users.

Many modern smartphones these days have the ability to capture images from their camera app in RAW format. These RAW images are unprocessed photo files that contain more data than JPEG files, making them larger, but also giving photographers more flexibility when editing their photos.

As spotted by 9to5Google, Google Photos now appears to save these RAW images by default on Android devices that have this file type enabled in their Camera app. This can become a real problem as it would undoubtedly affect storage limits in the Photos app as well as data limits in cases where backup via mobile network is enabled.

Image credit – 9to5Google

9to5 found this to be the case on a Pixel 8 device that had already taken RAW images from its camera, where the next day a notice appeared in Google Photos stating that “New RAW photos will appear in view Photos and will now be saved. “. Additionally, the images were automatically uploaded to the Google Photos backup and appeared in the main photo grid, marked with a “RAW” badge in the upper right corner. Opening the full image revealed the versions RAW and JPEG of the photo.

However, this only seems to happen with new images taken with the device and not existing ones in the library. It is not yet known whether this only occurs on the Pixel 8 series because I couldn’t reproduce it on a Pixel Fold using the latest version of Google Photos.

Currently, all Google accounts include 15 GB of free storage, shared between all Google apps. Most users will use up this storage fairly quickly, especially when you add the size of Android device backups and Gmail attachments to that number.

Unless you opt for external storage solutions, if you use Google Photos, you’re probably paying for a Google One plan that offers additional cloud storage. Hopefully Google fixes this and clarifies whether this is the new default behavior for the app – and what to do if storage is an issue.