Forum Discussion
Help with Onedrive and Samsung Gallery
I think there may be some confusion about how OneDrive and Samsung Gallery work together.
OneDrive does not normally move your photos from your phone to the cloud. In most cases, your photos exist both on the device and in OneDrive after they are backed up.
However, there is an important exception: after photos have been backed up, Samsung and OneDrive may offer a "Free up space" or storage optimization option. If that option was used at some point, some photos might have been removed from the device and kept only in OneDrive.
Before disconnecting Samsung Gallery from OneDrive, I would recommend:
- Install the official Microsoft OneDrive app and sign in with the same Microsoft account.
- Confirm that all your photos and videos are visible in the OneDrive app.
- Check whether an optimization or "Free up space" feature was used previously.
- Put the phone in Airplane Mode and try opening several older photos and videos. If they open normally, they are likely stored locally on the device. If they do not open, they may exist only in OneDrive and should be downloaded first.
Personally, I would trust the official Microsoft OneDrive app more than the Samsung Gallery integration when verifying what is actually stored in the cloud versus what is stored on the device.
Based on your description, my concern is that some files may have been removed from the phone by a storage optimization feature in the past, which would explain why OneDrive is now warning that the original files should be downloaded before the Samsung/Microsoft integration ends.
Hello! Thank you so much for replying! I haven't used the 'free up space' feature, at least not on my own accord, so that shouldn't be happening by itself. I'm still quite confused about what's going on, as it's the 30th and it appears all of my photos are where they originally were, and I have received no indication the sync officially ended, the option to use it is still there and on, and when I turned on airplane mode all my photos were visible both in the gallery and on my Onedrive. I don't know what the time frame for the transition is.
I think it was announced that photos you shared to Onedrive via your gallery with sync will 'disappear from your device', but will remain on Onedrive, which, if that's the case, is inconvenient for offline, anytime viewing and also having no items available accessible my phone itself. But that's what I interpreted that as meaning.
