[Update: fixed] Google Photos skipping pictures while uploading

Update (April 03):

Google has fixed whatever was causing the issue. The confirmation came from a member of Google’s Top Contributor program on Twitter:

Another update (March 28):

Google is working on the fix.

Update (March 28):

An expert (a member of Google’s Top Contributor program) recently acknowledged the issue while reverting back to us on Twitter. Here’s what they said:

Update (March 27, 2018):

Looks who’s back, back again. Apparently, the upload skipped issue is back to trouble Google Photos’ users. While Google officially didn’t give much of a word on the matter earlier, the complaints somehow vanished with time, suggesting the problem was resolved.

But now, Google Photos (Web client) users are reaching out to us reporting that the application is again skipping pictures/videos while uploading, irrespective of whether it’s a small or big batch of photos.

Some of the affected users have also confirmed that the only way to upload the skipped pictures is by uploading the entire batch multiple times, unless all photos get uploaded (as can be seen in the sequence of images shared by a user here).

What’s worth mentioning is that the problem has nothing to do with duplicate images, and what’s troubling is that it takes a lot of time and effort to upload again and again, unless successfully done. We hope Google looks into the matter sooner than later to clear out the mess that Photos is currently causing the users.

Original Story:

Did you ever bother to crosscheck whether Google Photos actually uploaded all the pictures it was commanded to? Reason being, users report that the app is skipping pictures during upload, in some cases.

This issue came to notice on June 22, 2017. Users who uploaded multiple pictures at a time, noted some of them went missing, when uploaded using Web interface. A notification stating how many items were skipped was displayed for some, but not all.

Users who faced the issue note that larger the number of uploads, the more pictures were skipped. Some of the users encountered duplicates when they tried to manually upload all the pictures again, putting Google Photos’ ‘duplicate detection’ feature to question.

On June 28, 2017 an expert from Google products stated

“I often upload manually and create albums and found that sometimes a few photos were skipped for no obvious reason”.

He further added that

“Uploading again always succeeded. Having the photos in an album makes it easier to find the missing ones, but in principle uploading all photos again should not give duplicates, unless the photos were modified in between”.

The aforementioned comment clarifies that the Photos app does skip pictures while uploading. We also tried to reproduce the same at our end. Initially we tried to upload 160 photos and the app successfully uploaded all. But when 614 pictures were uploaded, it skipped some and managed to upload only 517 of them. To our knowledge, irrespective of the number, Google Photos does skip pictures while uploading.

In addition to Google Photos official forum, the issue has been reported by users on other websites like Reddit as well. If this ‘skipped during upload’ bug is troubling you as well, keep a tab here as we’ll bring timely updates of all further developments.

Source 1| Source 2