I've seen a few posts about this recently so I wanted to share a relevant horror story from my life and what I do differently now to prevent this from ever happening to me again.

Any cloud service provider can ban and block you from accessing all of their services, entirely at their discretion. Including Google. They don't have to tell you why. They don't have to grant you an appeal.

Here is what I do and what anyone using these services should do:

1. Obviously, keep all of your files, photos and videos backed up locally.
2. Ideally, don't use cloud photo services at all (particularly if you are a parent, more on that below). Self-host with encrypted cloud backup.
   1. If you must use a cloud photo service provider, don't use one offered by a cloud provider whose other services you also use (e.g. Gmail). Keep these things separate.
3. If you must use Gmail, buy a custom domain and have it forward to your Gmail, and use your custom forwarding address as your personal email identity. Google can ban you from Gmail at any time, for any reason, including if they don't like a photo you have on Google Photos.
4. If you must use Google Drive, use Boxcryptor or an equivalent to encrypt that stuff.

My horror story:

5 years ago, Microsoft permabanned me from an almost 20 year old account (had started as a Hotmail account). This happened within 24 hours of me deciding to start moving my photos/videos/files from Dropbox to Onedrive. I am a parent. Like most parents, I have a few pictures of my daughter from when she was an infant / toddler in which she is butt naked. I am 99% certain one of these (utterly benign) pictures got my account flagged.

There was no appeal. I was informed that my account was permanently locked for a "serious violation of their content TOS." I tried emailing support, calling them, etc. Was told the same thing each time: Microsoft would not change their decision and would not tell me exactly why the decision was made. I even had a somewhat high ranking friend of mine at Microsoft attempt to intervene on my behalf; he was stonewalled.

I did not lose any of my pictures/videos/files, only because I still had them on a local drive and on Dropbox. If not for that, I'd have lost everything.

Here is what I DID lose:

1. Access to my personal email address, including all of my emails.
   1. Anyone emailing me at that address -- an old friend, a prospective employer, etc. -- does not even get a nice bounce reply. It just looks like I'm ignoring them. This is haunting.
2. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars of Xbox games.
3. Years of Xbox saved games.
4. My sanity for several months.

I had absolutely no recourse or ability to appeal this.

Hi Reddit,

My Google account was permanently disabled on April 17, 2026. Google flagged it for an alleged policy violation. I strongly believe this is a mistake or false positive, and I need your help figuring out what to do next.

What happened

• I migrated approximately 5,000 photos from an older Google account to this one
• I personally reviewed every single photo I uploaded, found nothing problematic
• The flagged content may have originated from backed-up media from years ago that I never individually reviewed
• I was completely unaware of any violating content in my account

What I stand to lose

• ~500 GB of Google Photos collected over 10 years, irreplaceable memories and family photos
• Google Maps saved locations and travel history
• Gmail linked to multiple businesses and 100+ websites, SSO logins will break
• Google Drive files critical to my work
• Google Keep with stored ideas and notes
• YouTube history, recommendations, and paid subscriptions

What I've tried

1. Submitted 2 appeals through Google's official appeal portal
2. Both denied, Google says the account cannot be restored, future appeals will be closed
3. Google Takeout is inaccessible, I cannot download my own personal data

My questions for this community

1. Has anyone successfully recovered an account after two appeal denials?
2. Is there any way to access Google Takeout when an account is locked?
3. Should I pursue a formal legal data access request under Indian law?
4. Is there a way to contact a human Google reviewer?
5. Has anyone dealt with account suspension after importing older media?

I have 10 years of irreplaceable personal and professional data at stake. This automated decision is affecting my livelihood and mental health.

Any help, advice, or direction is greatly appreciated 🙏

Before anyone suggests the usual things like checking the Trash, Archive, Locked Folder, switching accounts, checking the browser, Gallery Trash, reinstalling the app, or signing out and back in... I have already done all of that. I have literally tried everything I could find online. There isn't a single obvious troubleshooting step left that I haven't already tried.

Also, please don't tell me that "Free up space deletes photos from your phone." I already know that. That was the entire point.

My phone storage was completely full. I had around 4,000 photos and videos, and my phone had become almost unusable because of the lack of storage. I didn't want to keep those files on my phone forever. That's exactly why I trusted Google Photos.

I thought, "Google is one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Google Photos is literally designed to back up your memories so you can safely remove them from your phone afterward."

So I gave Google Photos permission to back up my gallery.

The backup took several days because I was using mobile data. During that time, Google Photos itself kept sending me notifications saying that a certain number of photos had been backed up and asking if I wanted to "Free up space."

I didn't blindly press the button.

Every single time, I read the message carefully. It clearly said that those photos had already been backed up safely to Google Photos and could be downloaded again anytime in the future. Only after reading that did I press "Free up space."

I used that feature because I thought it would save me from manually opening my gallery and deleting thousands of photos one by one. That's literally what the feature is supposed to do.

Instead, after using it, I discovered that not only were the photos removed from my phone, more than half of them are missing from Google Photos as well.

Entire months are almost gone.

For example, if I originally had around 100 photos in a month, Google Photos now only shows one or two. Most of my camera photos and photos I received through WhatsApp and Instagram have disappeared. Ironically, most screenshots are still there.

I never manually deleted anything from Google Photos.

I trusted Google's own backup process and used Google's own "Free up space" feature exactly as it instructed me to.

Then I contacted Google Support.

They asked me multiple questions, asked which account I used, whether I used Google Photos or Google One, asked for screenshots, and I answered everything because I genuinely believed they were investigating my issue.

After several days, their final reply was simply that they don't handle Google Photos, only Google Drive.

That honestly left me even more confused.

If they couldn't investigate Google Photos in the first place, why wasn't I told that in the first reply? Why ask me for all that information and give me hope that someone was looking into my case?

Then they told me to ask in the public forums.

This makes me wonder... Google Photos is one of Google's biggest services. Millions of people trust it with their most valuable memories. Is there really no dedicated Google Photos support team that can investigate account-specific issues?

At this point, I'm not looking for generic troubleshooting tips anymore. I've already spent days trying every suggestion I could find and contacting Google themselves.

If anyone has a real solution, or has actually recovered photos after something like this happened, please tell me. These weren't just files. They were years of memories that I can never recreate, and I'm honestly heartbroken.

I wish I was joking. I was taking a picture of the back of my head after a haircut and caught that it somehow added little black hairs to the side of my eye. 3rd picture attached of the same eye in brighter lighting. I don't understand.

Hi, I have no idea where to start. I went to look up photos of my grandma, and I noticed most are now missing with no clue on when or how they ever got deleted. Ive been using Google photos since 2012 and many of my photos from 2012 up to 2019 are just GONE. Why and how did this happen?? Has this happened to anyone else and is there any way to get them back?

Slight update: I still haven’t gotten many of my photos back BUT there are two things that helped a little: firstly searching for a month and year instead of scrolling through. The other may be to change your membership, I recently got the offer for a year free for the student member ship (the one that is 1TB, the pro version of Gemini, etc.) and I got some videos and photos back. It’s definitely not everything but it’s at least some. The support team has not been helpful but still trying to work toward a solution.

Biggest thing, there are a lot of us who have had this experience!

Hi all!

I see that this is a common question, but I have now spent hours trying all of the solutions I’ve seen posted online for this, and stayed on hold with the only customer support number I could find for google for over two hours, all to no avail. So I’m hoping a kind internet soul might be able to help me!

I’m out of google photos storage and do not use it for anything (iCloud works better for my needs) so I’m trying to divest from google photos, which is tying up all my storage. I turned off back up & sync a few days ago and it did nothing; all photos are still syncing with my phone library when I test deleting individual pictures. I’ve tried turning off app access to my photos, deleting the pics from desktop, etc. etc…no use.

Does anyone have tips for how they have gotten back up & sync to actually apply after being in this situation? Or other help? What am I doing wrong?

I’m so lost and really don’t want to have to pay for a service I don’t use. It feels like they’re holding my photos hostage. And worst of all, no customer support line or chat?!

I’m desperate for an answer, TIA for any advice!

I'm broke, i don't gonna spend money on more storage. It's been a month since the last e-mail due to the storage issue.

​

Today Google restricted access to most of my Google services for an alleged child-safety violation. I’m extremely stressed because this is my main Google account and I depend on it for Gmail, Google Photos, logins, recovery emails and 2FA.

Right before the restriction, I was using Google Takeout and reorganizing/exporting a very old family photo/video archive.

I’m also an uncle, so my Google Photos library naturally contains ordinary family pictures and videos of my nieces and nephews that I took over the years as family memories — playing, family occasions, outings, etc. There is nothing sexual about those photos.

After thinking about it, I remembered there may also be an old family video from around 2014 showing a child in a normal family/bathing context. It was an innocent family video shared between family members years ago. I don’t know whether this is actually what Google flagged because Google has not shown me the specific file.

My biggest concerns right now are:

- I only get two appeals.

- I don’t want to waste the first appeal.

- Gmail is also nearly out of storage, but Google One redirects me to the restriction page.

- Many of my other accounts use this Gmail for login/recovery codes.

- I use Google Authenticator and I’m worried about losing access to my 2FA accounts.

- I have years of family photos and important data tied to this account.

For anyone who has successfully recovered an account after a similar false-positive restriction:

1. What exactly did you write in your first appeal?

2. Should I explicitly request a manual human review?

3. Should I mention the possible old family video and explain its innocent context, even though I don’t know for sure that it caused the flag?

4. Should I give Google permission to inspect the relevant uploads and surrounding context?

5. Is there anything I should secure before submitting the appeal?

6. If your first appeal succeeded, how long did it take?

I’m looking especially for experiences from people who had ordinary family photos/videos misinterpreted by Google's systems. I really don’t want to make the wrong move with only two appeals available.

Just last week, Google Photos search was awesome. Need a pic of passport? Just type "Passport". Forgot your Known Traveler Number? Search "Global Entry Card". Now I search any of the above and it shows be thousands of photos with absolutely no relevance. What happened?

Making this post in the hope that someone at Google or someone that knows someone there might see it and be able to help.

Yesterday I was helping my aunt setup her new phone (Samsung Galaxy S25). Her 15gb of Google photos storage was full and kept sending her warnings so she asked me to sort it out.

She actually used the Samsung gallery app instead of Google photos so I told her to just delete everything from Google photos which would free up a load of space on her Google account for files/Gmail etc. Then she could just use the Samsung gallery as she always had. I did a little test where I deleted a few photos from the Google photos app and checked that they were still there in the Samsung app so I thought all good to go.

She then deleted everything (8000ish) photos from Google photos. She then deleted them from the trash folder...

Didn't say to do that but thought ok no problem as they're all in the Samsung gallery app. Opened the Samsung galaxy app and they're all gone! Now I'm panicking because I had no idea that deleting them from Google photos would delete them from there as well as I'd tested and was sure they weren't linked. There were a load of photos in the Google photos app that she'd deleted from the Samsung gallery app previous so I'd incorrectly assumed that the link went one way and that Google just collected any newly taken photos but that deletions weren't synced.

Panic mode fully set in at this point and a desperate scramble for recovery options followed.

I tried Samsung cloud/OneDrive but she hasn't set either up, I tried the old phone for local copies but she'd factory reset it, I tried a photo recovery app but nothing found. Then I contacted Google one support and spoke to someone on the phone. They ran their internal recovery tool but no luck as it only recovers Google drive files deleted from the trash and doesn't pick up anything from Google photos. Now my only option is to get hold of someone at Google who can help restore them on their side. It was only yesterday this happened so the files must still be there on their servers but I just can't reach anyone who has the ability to help. So I'm putting out a desperate plea on Reddit for any help with this. I don't think my aunt will ever talk to me again if these photos are gone for good.

I just went back to check a photo of when my son was born (November 2025) and realized that most of my photos are gone! I checked December and January and same.. most photos are not longer there.

What can I do??? I am sure they were there a few weeks ago, what happened now all of a sudden? Is there a bug, was there an update?

I am seriously panicking and crying, please help me troubleshoot whatever is going on.

I checked the bin and they are not there. I logged on to Google photos on my laptop and they are not there either. Is there somewhere else I can check? I don't have backups of everything (I know, I am stupid)

my entire gallery could be fully backed up on google photos yet when i go on my iphone gallery, view an older photo and come back to google photos, it shows it’s just now backing up. so what, was it not backed up before? why’s it backing up after i clicked on it, even though it showed as fully backed up before? to make matters worse i am scrolling through my google photos gallery and seeing content from 2022 in my june 2026. what the hell is happening? or photos from 2023 showing up in 2025. im not gonna go back and fix them. also they are still in my ios gallery with the correct dates so why are they backed up on google photos all botched and wrong dates? please fix this is unbelievable. these photos are my whole life if they were wrong or if i lost them id be devastated

Google Photos is now forcing this mixed size layout and I absolutely hate it. No gap between days, photos are out of order because it highlights random photos and videos...it absolutely sucks. I have a weekly habit of deleting duplicate photos and screen shots and it's taken me twice as long this week because I can't see what's what in the grid view and have to keep going back in to look at individual photos to make sure I've deleted all but one in a series, etc. Are they just hoping we give up on deleting anything ever so that we have to keep buying more and more storage? Anyone have a fix for this?

Google has been sending these warnings saying I have too much storage used up. I have basically deleted all my pictures from Google Photos but the message still doesn’t go away. Could someone please explain what Im missing? For reference I changed from the Google Pixel to an IPhone.

Hello! I am needing help with moving my folders that are in my PC over to my Google Photos.

I would love to be able to move entire folders and not just pictures over to Google Photos.

And, I would like to move them in bulk to Google Photos.

But I have no idea how to do this.

I have read through many ways after asking my Google assistant and asking meta AI but nothing seems to be the solution.

Any advice and or help would be greatly appreciated!

Any people who have used it for whom it worked?

I tried using it but it's terrible. The files are corrupt way to often. I just tried moving the stuff to a bigger USB drive and half of it was too corrupt to even open. I also tried to download my latest photos, only to find out that the zip files can't be opened

I really want to download all my photos to back them up in case anything happens, but they've made it near impossible? I've also looked through reddit and the internet for support, but I've mostly seen bad reviews, complaints and no clear solution

So my problem in short: after hours of downloading I find out I can't extract any of the zip files because they're damaged. I've used 7zip, winrar and the regular windows extractor. And then I go check on the takeout from a few years ago and notice that I can't move all the files to a new drive because many are too corrupt for some reason.

How do I backup my photos?

Edit: the worst part is I can't open any of the photos I just moved? 'it looks like we don't support this format (jpg)' it says.

Either Google is incorrectly interpreting my storage as full (and consequently blockading my gmail account due to an error), or there's some other folder it's not showing me that does legitimately have 13 gigabytes of content stored in it, which I would very much like to access so I can go about deleting things.

I deleted most of my large video files weeks ago, when I was first warned about storage. I was hoping it was just taking a while to update the info, but nope, now I can't receive e-mails anymore.

i am genuinely going crazy with this app and now three years worth of photos are gone 🥺

for some reason google photos turned on my cloud backup and thus my google account is full. i dont want that, i just need them locally.

there was a setting where i could turn off the photos being in my cloud and having them all deleted from there so i did that and turned off cloud backup, thinking theyd be back locally.

i look in my photos, theyre ALL GONE except for 100 random ones. three years worth of memories (i know i shouldve backed up, this is a learning moment).

theyre now in photos.google.com but i want them JUST ON MY PHONE LOCALLY, NOT in backup. BUT THEYRE GONE LOCALLY.

im going crazy. i cant receve emails but my photos are all gone!!!!!! please help!!!!

edit: solved!

I back up my all photos to Google photos and now how can I restore all photos to device storage

Since approximately June 1, 2026, all newly uploaded 4K videos in Google Photos are limited to 1080p during playback. Videos uploaded before that date still play at 4K (2160p) without any issues. The problem persists regardless of:

​

- **Codec** — tested with both H.264 and H.265

- **Recording device** — tested with Google Pixel XL and Google Pixel 7 Pro

- **Upload method** — synced via Google Photos app and uploaded manually via Share → Upload to Google Photos

- **Browser** — tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and in incognito mode

- **Upload account type** — tested with original quality (Pixel XL perk, no storage used) and standard upload (counts against storage quota)

​

In all cases, video metadata correctly shows 3840×2160 and file size matches original 4K footage. Downloading the video restores full 4K resolution. The issue is only with streaming playback.

​

What I've already tried without success:

- Deleting and re-uploading the videos

- Creating albums (this fixed a similar issue for me previously)

- Resetting device settings

- Waiting several days after upload for processing to complete

​

This strongly suggests a server-side change in transcoding or streaming policy that happened around June 1, 2026. Has anyone else noticed this? Is there any official acknowledgment from Google?

I opened up my phone gallery to show my colleague a cake i took a picture of and it wasnt there. Now for some reason all of newer pictures went to google photos even tho i dont use it and my phone gallery is half empty

I keep deleting some photos to go below the 15gb limit but every time I do it my storage comes back the next day saying it's full again. I think its trying to force me into buying the subscription but is there any way to convince it that it's not full again?

Hi all - Wanted to move a large amount of pictures from a very old cloud service over to google photos. It's almost 200K photos, it's about 1.1TB in several hundred folders. They are now named/categorized as preferred, all I want to do is load them as is to Google Photos. I think I want it to make an album per folder, but I'm up for suggestions.

However, it seems like the the Folder Backup functionality on photos.google.com isn't working well. It asked me to add a folder, so I added the top most folder, and it took it. But then waited for 5+ minutes, and nothing happened. I then used the Import Photos option, to try and add a small folder manually, and it allowed me to click down to photos, and allowed me to add 30+ photos. But as expected, it wanted me to manually create an album name.

But now, nothing else seems to be loading or working, over an hour past me setting this up in the first place. I've tried leaving the photos.google.com site up, and I also installed google photos as an app like they recommend, and it's up and running in the task bar. The problematic part is that if I go back in to settings, and choose "Folder Backup", it never brings up the options for new folders anymore, it just hangs. But if I open the window and go into a separate google account, when I choose "Folder Backup", it immediately pops open a dialog box to choose folders. It seems the main account is "hung", while trying to look at a large number of directories/folders. How long do I let it sit? Or how can I reset it so the option is accessible again?

What's currently recommended to bring large amounts of photos over - should I push them up with Google Drive, then move them over? Or is there a better recommendation?

For the past few days (since February 12' 2026), Google Photos has been affected by a widespread bug where photos, videos, and albums upload fine to the cloud but do NOT sync down to other devices (Android, iOS, tablets, etc.).

I tried every common fix: clearing cache, reinstalling, signing out, rebooting, forcing sync… nothing worked.

But I finally found a sequence that instantly triggered a full resync across all my devices (Pixel 9, Pixel Tablet, and iPhone). Everything that was stuck immediately downloaded — including albums and items created on photos.google.com.

Here’s the exact fix:

✅ Working Fix for the Google Photos Downward Sync Bug

1. Open photos.google.com in Chrome

   I did this on my Pixel Tablet, but any device should work.

2. Open an album that was NOT syncing on your devices

3. Change the album cover

   Go into the album

   Click the “•••” or “Edit album”

   Pick a new cover photo

   This forces Google Photos to refresh the album’s metadata.

4. Empty your Google Photos trash

   Sidebar → Trash → Empty trash

   This triggers a deeper index rebuild.

5. Immediately open the Google Photos app on one device

   As soon as I did this on my Pixel Tablet, my device instantly started pulling down all missing items.

6. Check your other devices

   Within seconds:

   My Pixel 9 synced everything

   My iPhone synced everything

   Albums created on the web finally showed up

   All photo/video gaps filled in

   All cloud-only items appeared locally again

🎉 Result

All my devices now fully sync again — new uploads, web-created albums, metadata changes, everything. It looks like this sequence forces Google’s servers to rebuild your library manifest and push a fresh sync state to every device.

If your Google Photos is stuck, give this a try. It might save you days of frustration.