Seeing corrupted images in your Google Photos library? This has turn out to be a “trending” situation on the Google help pages in latest days. Fortunately, Google is aware of about it and plans to dole out a repair.

It began with a Google Photos support thread that cropped up over the weekend from a person complaining about “water-stained” images. “Issue looks like a water stain with massive discoloration,” they wrote. They proceed to explain the issue in a follow-up reply to the thread:

Most of the images are from round 2014. These are photos I do know for a reality had been uploaded and saved correctly. I seen the difficulty as we speak in a images flashback occasion. I’ve tried viewing on a number of browsers in addition to downloading the images into native reminiscence. There is seemingly no sample to which images are corrupted and which aren’t.

Eventually, extra customers chimed in with their expertise of seeing corrupted photographs on Google Photos. “Confirming I also have this issue, was looking for some old photos of family and noticed this on almost all of them,” writes another user, who posted further pattern images. Further down the thread, a Google help “Diamond Product Expert” posts over a dozen hyperlinks describing related results.

“Just been looking through anniversary photos, on Google photos, from 8 years ago and many images are shown as corrupted,” writes a person in another thread. The nearly waterlogged images began showing on Reddit and in varied Google-related sub-Reddits, too.

For funsies, I attempted downloading a handful of photographs from 2014 that I way back uploaded to Google Photos. I couldn’t recreate the corruption that different customers described—or maybe I don’t acknowledge it as a result of the smartphone I used again then was already fairly low-resolution. But there are many examples within the varied Google Support and Reddit threads that present there is a matter plaguing of us.

Google responded once I requested if the difficulty was on its radar by confirming that it’s conscious of the issue and is “rolling out a fix.” This bug doesn’t influence authentic images saved in Google Photos, although you would possibly encounter it when downloading photographs or viewing them on iOS, Android, and the browser. I requested Google for follow-up data on what could be going fallacious on the technical aspect, however there was nothing further to share.

Either method, it is a cautionary story of what can transpire once we depend on the cloud and different providers to archive our information. I’ve a number of backups of my digital photographs on exhausting drives and within the cloud courting again to 2010, once I first adopted a smartphone. I strongly recommend that in case you’re not within the behavior of doing this, you begin as quickly as doable.