It’s official: Samsung Gallery now uses your Google storage to sync your photos and videos

Samsung’s partnership with Microsoft OneDrive ended in late September, leaving a pretty big gap in Samsung Gallery’s cloud backup capabilities. Although we already knew the company was going to partner with Google for cloud storage, that’s now getting officially confirmed.

Samsung today announced Gallery sync with Google storage to make it easier for users to back up their photos to the cloud and access them from anywhere. The sync feature works inside the Gallery app using your Samsung and Google accounts. That means if you’re already signed in with your Samsung and Google accounts on your device, you can just turn on the sync feature and start backing up your photos and videos.

The company is also adding a new “Free up space” feature in the Samsung Gallery app. It lets users remove original pictures and clips from their local storage once they have been backed up to the cloud. Users will still see preview thumbnails in the Gallery app, and if they tap an image to open it, the phone will download the original picture from the cloud.

The new Gallery sync feature uses your Google account storage to back up your photos and videos. It’s basically the same as using the Google Photos app to back up your image files. However, with the feature built into the native Gallery app, you don’t have to download the Google Photos app separately.

It’s worth noting that Samsung says the Gallery app will only show content synced through it after the service is enabled. If you already have photos backed up in Google Photos (which you probably do), they will not show up in the Samsung Gallery.

The new Gallery sync feature has started rolling out to select Galaxy devices running One UI 9, and Samsung says it will expand to more devices in phases. You can set it up by tapping the cloud icon in the Gallery app or by heading to Gallery Settings and turning on “Sync photos and videos.”