Intro
A friend is a heavy user of Google Photos on her iPhone 16. I am effectively her tech support even though I am more an Android fan. I guess everyone knows that situation!
So anyway, one day she says she cannot edit her photos as she used to in the Google Photos app. She gets into Edit, but can’t save anything and it sort of freezes.
Just some background first. All her photos get synced to Google Photos and the Google cloud account is shared by a couple family members. That part all looked to be in order. With 2 TB of cloud storage, there was plenty of space available.
The details
Well, I was looking at settings for Google Photos when I noticed that the setting that says something like Use cellular data was disabled. I enabled it and all was good.
Next problem, please
The next problem a few days after that was a lot trickier for me.
She says again she cannot edit. Nor can she see albums. When she clicks on Update the screen is blank and a circle of various colors appears – and never goes away. A phone restart has no effect. But otherwise she can see all her photos. Strange.
I learned how to close the app and restart it. No go. I read some of the many tips on the Internet. No one seemed to document this precise problem. There’s a lot of try these five thnigs type of tips, most of which contain painfully obvious things such as check your Network. Upgrade the app to the latest version. Stuff like that. I made sure she had free storage. It’s a new phone, there was plenty of space to spare. And I did try to get the latest version but she was already using it.
I checked her photos in Google Photos on another device, a PC as it happens to be. They were all there, her albums were there, they all looked good.
So I took the big step of deciding it would be safe to remove the app and reinstall it. That was one of the tips after all. And that is the beauty of having stuff in the cloud.
Well, that worked! What a relief. So not all those Internet tips are useless.
Conclusion
A frozen Google Photos app on a brand new iPhone 16 had these symptoms: could not edit photos, could not see any albums, could not bring up notices, but the photos themselves seemed to all be present. This situation was ultimately fixed by uninstalling then reinstalling the Google Photos app. I thought iOS was supposed to be this perfect environment where these things never happen. Guess not.