I was trying to help somebody get his goo photos back, but it didn't work out well. Goo pretended that it didn't know him, made him wait days and change his password, just bull. Then it took forever for it to load. When it did, there was nowhere near as much as there should have been. He's missing photos and albums from maybe ten years ago, which is ridiculous, especially considering that he has been paying maybe ten bucks a month to keep them. How do we make goo give up the goods?
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Disappearing photos
- Thread starter Rgarner
- Start date
I don't rely on cloud backups, so am not an expert on this, but it's hard to advise without knowing how the situation arose. What happened before he had to do what sounds like an account recovery procedure? What does "Google pretended that it didn't know him" mean? To me that sounds like they didn't recognise his email address, but the next bit sounds like a password recovery which means they did recognise the address. Has he done anything like a factory reset or a password change prior to this, or tried to free up space on his device (there are ways of doing that which will keep the backup with Google and there are ways which will delete it), or had any security issues with his account? Much as I don't trust any of these corporations, Google spontaneously losing his password and deleting many but not all of his photos is a low-probability event: not impossible, but I suspect that there's something on his side that's played a role, even if he doesn't know what. That's why knowing the background to this might help someone work out whether there is a solution.
The only practical suggestion I have is to check any "recycle bin" in the account for the missing images. If they are there then you can recover them, but it will probably be auto-deleted after some period so best to check soon.
But TBH it's likely that the only thing he can do is contact Google and ask them what happened to his data. Whether he even gets a reply I don't know - in reality even if they have screwed-up you have very little comeback on them (in fact it's probably buried in their T's and C's that you have none at all, though whether that would stand up in court is another matter).
The only practical suggestion I have is to check any "recycle bin" in the account for the missing images. If they are there then you can recover them, but it will probably be auto-deleted after some period so best to check soon.
But TBH it's likely that the only thing he can do is contact Google and ask them what happened to his data. Whether he even gets a reply I don't know - in reality even if they have screwed-up you have very little comeback on them (in fact it's probably buried in their T's and C's that you have none at all, though whether that would stand up in court is another matter).
He's really bad with tech. I do know that I helped him change his password some time ago, but they keep giving him crap about it. They should let people keep their old passwords instead of forcing them to switch and then they can't remember the new one, or maybe any. I think all the old photos are not there, only pretty recent. I had helped to put them in albums years back and would certainly recognize them. How can goo even be contacted? I'm sure they go to A LOT of trouble to prevent that...
There's a Google Photos help page at Google Photos Help. That used to have a "contact us" link at the bottom, but like many of these companies that has now gone, but there is a "troubleshoot or send feedback" option. Or if you are logged into the Photos app you can tap on your avatar (top-right corner of the screen), scroll down to the bottom and click on "help and feedback", then scroll down again and there's a "send feedback" at the bottom.