Google Drive is a free cloud storage solution that saves a copy of your precious media files. However, the past couple of days have been a disaster for many Drive users. Users have noticed Google Drive corrupting older images.
The photos are losing their clarity and contain white dots in weird patterns. In some images, the white dots canvass a large portion of the image with aggressive discoloration. Google Drive users have flooded the Google community forum with images that are slowly being destroyed on their Drive accounts. Affected users say that Google Drive photos corruption happening with old images, some of which that date back to 2002.
Google Drive Photos corruption reasons
While forums are flooded with images highlighting the issue, we did not see any Google support person venturing into the chat. Neither did Google share anything about the issue that is wrecking old photos on the Drive. Images are getting lossier, losing their sheen and details and having white spots all over them.
Even if you try to download the photos, the downloads contain the same pixelated copies of the images. Some users tried to edit the photos, during which the white dots disappeared and didn’t reappear again when they saved the changes. But this isn’t a reasonable fix for users who have hundreds of photos saved on Drive.
However, one community user KerryC suggested a method to redownload original copies of the images affected by Google Drive photos corruption. You can simply click on the photo and select the download original option to download the original copy to your device. KerryC shared that the downloaded original copy doesn’t contain white spots or discoloration.
Or, you can also export all your data from the Drive. It will download all the images along with the ones that contain white spots. You can then delete all the images with the text ‘edited’ in them and keep the original ones. It is wise to not rely on cloud storage only and keep a backup copy of your data on physical storage as well.
At the time of writing this post, some users shared that the images are reverting to their original form. So the issue could likely fix itself in a while too. Google is experimenting with new features that process photos more extensively.
It could be that one such feature might have glitched older images. This is possible since the affected images go way back to 2002 and were probably imported from digital cameras since Drive didn’t exist back then.
