I’ll give you some general information. If you’ve recently changed your phone and have a fairly recent Android (in my case, I have a Google Pixel 8a), it may be that in the classic process of looking at the photos you’ve taken in Google Photos and wanting to get your hands on a specific one to improve it. You’ve come across a curious detail: Google Photos only lets you save the edited photo as a copy.
This is a peculiarity of the way the Google Photos app handles HDR photos by default (a setting that is recommended to be enabled and actually comes by default) in newer devices since Android rolled out support for HDR photos.
Google Photos duplicates HDR photos you edit and that’s a problem
As we mentioned in the introduction, Android recently added support for HDR, in version 14, which in turn was first released with the Pixel 8. In this way, photos taken in HDR are rendered with more contrast than those with standard dynamic range. reach, thus obtaining brighter lights and darker shadows. And it’s good.
The normal thing when you edit a photo in a camera roll app like Google Photos (and what it does with SDR photos) is that the photo edits are not permanent. Let me expla in: you can retouch whatever you want, but you always have the option of going back and leaving the photo in its initial state. Even if you saved it. In fact, as we’ve seen, 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 edited and saved as a copy. This way you won’t have one photo stored but two. So you go to your Google Photos and You get the original photo and a retouched copy, which on the one hand makes it difficult to navigate through your memories and on the other hand takes up double the storage space.
When editing HDR photos in Google Photos, you can only save one copy and they are duplicates
As explained in Android Police, the initial editing of HDR photos in Google Photos involved stripping them of the brightness data that makes their high dynamic range possible. So Google solved the problem by saving edited HDR photos as copies to keep the original data separate from the edited copy (in DTS). Eventually, the Menlo Park company refined this solution so that edited images aren’t degraded to SDR, but I kept this fix.
After consulting with a Google representative about the issue, they assured that they are working on it, so we imagine that this incident is only a matter of time before it is completely resolved. During, All you have to do is remove the duplicates by hand and wait..
Cover | Enrique Perez (Xataka)
In Xataka Android | 19 Tips to Get the Most Out of Google Photos
