Xiaomi's Gallery Sync shutting down, photos can be transferred to Google Photos
It seems that Xiaomi is planning to discontinue the Gallery Sync feature of Xiaomi Cloud. Developer Kacper Skrzypek discovered a draft announcement for this, but the company is yet to make it official.
For those unfamiliar, Gallery Sync gave Xiaomi users 5GB of free cloud storage that could hold photos and videos. But if this is the first time you hear of this, you have nothing to worry about.
As for those who do use the feature, Xiaomi has apparently prepared a way to transfer your photos and videos over to Google Photos. And if you don’t want to do that you will have the option of downloading a copy to store locally instead.
Gallery Sync also has a paid version that gives users more storage – Xiaomi will cancel subscriptions and issue a full refund.
The draft announcement uses placeholder dates (“XX XX 2022”), so it’s not clear when Gallery Sync will be shut down, but it seems that it’s happening this year. Note that the other Xiaomi Cloud services (syncing and backing up contacts, messages and notes) will continue working. Also, it’s possible that Gallery Sync will remain in operation in China, but that hasn’t been confirmed.
Here is an image that shows how the photo transfer will work:
Gallery Sync users will be able to transfer their photos and videos to Google Photos
Once the official announcement comes, you will want to download or transfer your data sooner rather than later – it sounds like Xiaomi will only keep the data throughout 2023 and will delete it afterwards. The announcement says “We offer a way to download Gallery data stored in Xiaomi Cloud to your personal device. The data download will be available only until XX, XX, 2023, after which this feature will no longer be supported.”
PS. the original announcement was here, but it has been removed. Again, the timing of the shutdown is unknown and it seems like it will be different in each region.
