Google Photos client (v3.39) addresses a critical issue with RAW files

Very often, Google Photos’ users complain about the service eating up excessive storage. One of the major reasons being, some RAW files get uploaded in Original Quality despite choosing High Quality (unlimited storage) in Settings. Not anymore though.

The newest version (3.39) of Backup and Sync (the common client for Google Photos and Google Drive) offers a pill by notifying about the files that failed to convert, and hence saves you from losing your storage.

While the company did not reveal any such functionality in the official release notes for version 3.39, Google employee Rishi broke the news this morning on the company’s official help forum while reverting back to a user who ran out of storage (for the same reason that we mentioned above).

Following is the complete statement:

Try using version 3.39. Google Photos fails to convert all images (such as some RAW files) to High Quality. When this happens, your account will consume storage for what was uploaded. The new version 3.39 will report to you what has failed to convert so you can take the additional action of deleting them en masse if you chose to do so (or perhaps you wish to leave them as is as backup in which case you can ignore it)

Here’s the affected user’s original post, followed by Google employee Rishi’s response confirming the new functionality:

Rishi clearly mentioned that the latest version not only acknowledges the failure to convert RAW files into High Quality, but also facilitates deletion of such files. Hence, the storage trouble that certain files (uploaded in Original Quality) created, won’t be a botheration anymore.

So, if you have had an issue like the one mentioned in this article, upgrade to the latest version of the application. And yes, if the problem persists for you, do let us know in comments below.

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