Running out of storage on your OnePlus phone? The Gallery app could be the culprit

Many savvy smartphone users easily ignore the built-in apps that companies stuff into Android devices. It’s so easy to forget that phones have a pre-installed photo gallery app, for instance, especially since many see it as just an app meant for viewing photos they take.

Admittedly, I am a culprit on this front and if you are anything like me, you’ll agree that some stock apps simply don’t cut it. But this is not always the case. Matter of fact, some OEMs have great stock apps out there and one such app is the OnePlus Gallery app.

OnePlus launched its cloud storage service known as OnePlus Cloud Gallery last September alongside the 7T series for backing up photos stored in the OnePlus Gallery app.

OnePlus Gallery app, in case you are still wondering, acts as an alternative to Google Photos on OnePlus devices. The latter is used by most people for backing up photos and videos on Google’s cloud storage.

Well, as you may have guessed, OnePlus Cloud Gallery is where photos and videos in the OnePlus Gallery app are backed-up, making it easy to retrieve them on any other device that has an internet connection and even automatically sort them by time, location, etc., just like Google Photos.

But according to reports, it seems the co-existence of Google Photos and OnePlus Gallery app is proving to be problematic for some owners of various OnePlus smartphones. It has been claimed that this app could be at the heart of your device running out of storage for no reason.

Apparently, the OnePlus Gallery app conflicts with Google Photos and in the process prevents users from freeing up storage space on their phones. Media files you thought you deleted from Google Photos are, in fact, still stored in the OnePlus Gallery app’s recycle bin.

This means that after freeing up local storage by emptying photos that have already been backed up to the cloud, you also have to empty the recycle bin associated with the OnePlus Gallery app since the supposedly deleted files still live in the app’s local storage.

To do this, launch the Gallery app, go to Collections and empty the folder known as “Recently deleted” at the bottom. Quite easy, you might think. But why should you go through this in the first place? What of those who don’t know it’s actually happening?

Another alternative would be to disable the OnePlus Gallery app and stick to Google Photos. But what if you prefer the former to the latter? Well, our hope is that OnePlus and Google will address this issue sooner than later so that one uses their preferred service.

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