Users of Google Photos, the tech giant’s photo backup and sharing service, report that old photos are corrupted, with discoloration, lines and other objects appearing in old photos.
The bug seems to affect photos from 2014 and earlier, with some users reporting issues with photos from 2002. Google said in a statement that they’ve released a fix.
Via Android Police:
As Android Police founder Artem Rusakovsky noted, many people have taken to Google’s support forums and Reddit to complain about the issue. Messages first started appearing about two days ago and all affected photos have the same corruption. It looks like there are random lines and missing pixel dots randomly replaced with black or white pixels. Many of these artifacts form random lines, as if there were missing data for certain points in the photographs. The shapes and forms created this way look almost artistic, but of course, you don’t want your precious memories to look like that.
The good news is that some issues are resolved automatically. For their part, they could no longer see the artifacts.
Others unlucky enough to receive auto-healing have managed to get rid of the artifacts by clearing the Photos app’s cache and reopening the affected photos, then viewing the error-free versions.
In a statement made by 9to5Google, the company said, “We are aware of the issue and are releasing a fix. The original images are not affected.”
Cloud services such as Google Photos should not be used as backups of personal files, especially family memories captured in photos. The best and safest backup option is an external hard drive or USB drive kept in a safe place.
Source: Breitbart
