Reply To: Image Apps on Samsung Phone

[Lisa]

Hi Tom,
Thanks for sharing. Here is what I found about the second storage on your Android device.

Samsung Gallery app

Local storage: By default, all your camera shots, screenshots, and downloaded images are stored locally on the phone’s internal memory (or SD card, if installed).

Backup option: Samsung offers to back these up to OneDrive (Microsoft’s cloud service). You can turn this on or off in Gallery’s settings. If enabled, photos sync to your Microsoft account and can be viewed from any device logged into that account.

Google Photos app

Viewer vs. backup: Even if you’ve never set it up, the app still shows the same photos stored locally on your device (so it looks like it’s duplicating Gallery, but it’s just reading the same storage).

Cloud storage: If you turn on Backup & Sync inside Google Photos, then images will upload to Google Photos (not Google Drive anymore — though they used to be tied together). They’ll live in your Google account’s cloud storage.

Optional: If you don’t enable backup, it acts as just another photo viewer without cloud sync.

So in short:

Gallery = Samsung + optional OneDrive sync.
Photos = Google + optional Google Photos cloud sync.

Both show the same local pictures if backup is off.