I’ll give you some background information. If you have recently changed your phone and have a moderately new Android (in my case I have a Google Pixel 8a), you may be in the classic process of looking at the photos you have taken in Google Photos and wanting to get your hands on them. You have come across an interesting detail to improve a certain one: Google Photos only lets you save the edited photo as a copy.

This is a quirk of how the Google Photos app manages photos with HDR (a parameter that is recommended to be enabled and actually comes by default) on newer terminals by default since Android has disbanded support for HDR photos.

Google Photos is copying your edited HDR photos and that’s a problem

As we mentioned in the introduction, Android has recently added HDR support in its 14th version, which was first released with the Pixel 8. Thanks to this, photos taken in HDR are processed with more contrast than the standard dynamic range, thus obtaining brighter lights and darker shadows.And that’s good.

The normal thing when you edit a photo in a camera roll app like Google Photos (as it does with SDR photos) is that the photo edits are not permanent. Let me explain: You can retouch whatever you want, but you always have the option to go back and leave the photo in its original state. Even if you saved it. In fact, as we see, this is what happens on iOS with HDR photos, but not on Android and that’s a problem.

Because with HDR photos in Google Photos, they can only be retouched and saved as copies. As a result, not one but two of your photos are stored. Then you go to your Google Photos and You find the original photo and a retouched copy; This, on the one hand, hinders your experience of scrolling through your memories, while on the other hand, it doubles the storage space.

When editing HDR photos in Google Photos, you can only save one copy, and they are copies

As explained on Android Police, initially editing HDR photos in Google Photos meant stripping them of the luminance data that enabled their high dynamic range; So Google solved the problem by saving the edited HDR photos as copies to preserve the original data separately from the edited ones. copy (in SDR). Finally, the Menlo Park company developed this solution to prevent edited images from being downgraded to SDR. I kept this fix.

After consulting with a Google representative about the issue, they assured us they were working on it, so we think it’s only a matter of time before this incident is fully resolved. Meanwhile, All you have to do is manually delete the duplicates and wait..

Cover | Enrique Pérez (Xataka)

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