Summary
Summary
- Samsung Gallery replaces OneDrive sync with Google Photos on select Galaxy phones and tablets running One UI 9, with more devices to follow.
- Synced photos and videos appear in Gallery across supported Galaxy devices. Memories and live albums still require backing up directly through Google Photos.
- Gallery uploads photos and videos in original quality, drawing from the 15GB of free storage shared by Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. Previously, Samsung announced the end of Gallery’s direct integration with Microsoft OneDrive on September 30. Now, Samsung has introduced Google storage as the cloud-service replacement for OneDrive, with a neat feature to free up local storage. As of November 11, Samsung says select Galaxy phones and tablets running One UI 9 have already received the update, with more support said to come in phases. If you’ve previously used OneDrive for backing up your Samsung Gallery footage, you can still access it through the OneDrive app or its website. And if Google Drive is not your thing, you can keep sending your new photos and videos to Microsoft’s cloud by turning on Camera Backup in the OneDrive app. Samsung Gallery can now free up space on your phone On supported devices, Google storage integration allows you to have your photos on multiple devices. Say you take a photo on your Galaxy phone and want to pull it up on your tablet. If you enable sync with the same Samsung and Google accounts signed in on both devices, you can open Gallery on your tablet and see the photo there. The Gallery app first shows you a preview, but you can download the photo in its original quality whenever you want. Moreover, you can pick specific folders to sync, so you don’t accidentally eat up all of your storage with random screenshots and unwanted footage. Once your photos and videos have synced, you can use Samsung Gallery’s new “Free up space on this phone” option to remove the local copies. The originals are stored in Google Photos, and you can still see their previews in app. If you need a full-resolution copy back on your phone, you can download it again. For now, the integration is one-way only, as it can only take the photos you upload through the Gallery app directly. If you’ve spent years backing up everything directly to Google Photos, that cloud-based library won’t automatically appear in Samsung’s app. There are other limitations, too. While you can view and share Gallery uploads in Google Photos, you can’t use features like live albums and Google Photos Memories unless you back up those photos directly through Google Photos itself. What about managing cloud storage? Bear in mind that, with the free tier, Google gives you the same 15GB of free storage you share across Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos. Samsung Gallery uploads your photos and videos at original quality, which means a couple of minutes of 4K footage can easily fill up your storage. If smaller uploads are important to you, the Storage Saver setting in Google Photos can help you when you back up directly through Google’s app. If you prefer to stay in the Gallery app, syncing only the folders you care about is one way to keep your cloud storage from filling up as quickly. Another way is to subscribe to a Google One plan. Google gives you 100GB of cloud storage for $1.99 per month, and you can upgrade that to 2TB for a monthly bill of 9.99 bucks.