Delete photos from Gallery and maintaining on cloud servers

[MoonWolf1990]

I currently have a Note 20 Ultra and am upgrading to the S24 because I'm in need of more storage that my Note does not have. (I am bummed. I love my phone)

I'm in the process of clearing out my Gallery but there is a problem. If I delete a photo from my phone, it gets deleted from my backup drives such as Google Drive or OneDrive. There's a lot of photos I want to delete from my phone, but want to keep in Cloud as I need it for legal reasons. 

Does anybody know of a way to be able to delete photos from your gallery while making sure they stay in cloud servers?

[L2S_SAM_Eng]

Use Google Photos. Also, verify in drive that it's removing them. Gallery will only remove physical storage. Not cloud.

[MoonWolf1990]

When I delete from my phone, it is also deleting from cloud. I don't want that. I want these particular photos in cloud but no longer in my gallery. And thank you for the reply. 😊

[L2S_SAM_Eng]

Do you have extra storage space within your Google Account?

[MoonWolf1990]

Storage space isn't an issue. The issue is the syncing. I just want to save certain albums in my cloud without it syncing to my phone. I don't want to turn off syncing entirely. But it's an issue if I want to delete these photos from my phone , but then it also deletes from the cloud. And vice versa. If I keep an album in my cloud, it'll just sync to my phone. It's quite annoying that the cloud servers offer more flexibility on this.

[L2S_SAM_Eng]

Yeah. Unfortunately, what you are trying to achieve is not possible yet.

Everything is synced both ways.

Although gallery should not delete from cloud. Unless you are using Microsoft cloud then I don't know about that. I never liked it because there was too many problems. I personally just use Google Photos which stores everything in drive and syncs across all devices immediately. I hardly have any Samsung applications on the Samsung devices I have 😄

[L2S_SAM_Eng]

Open Google Photos, run the backup, then click free up space. It will store it cloud side and remove from local storage.

[LongHiker]

@MoonWolf1990 You can use My Files to copy (or move) the photos you want to keep into a different folder on your Google Drive, OneDrive, or other linked cloud services. 

I have a Synology NAS (network drive). Synology has an app which pushes all of your photos and videos to the NAS. When I delete a photo from my phone it is not deleted from my NAS. If I delete it from my NAS, I get a prompt asking me if I want to delete it from the phone and NAS or NAS only. 

[realaud]

If you delete a photo directly from the Gallery, it should still remain in Google or in One Drive (wherever you are syncing). That's the entire purpose of backup.  If, however, you delete the photos from within Google Photos, it will delete the backup photo from Google, as well as the original from your phone, as Google assumes you no longer want the photo at all (same if you are syncing with One Drive).  You can always either attach your phone to a computer or attach a flash drive to your phone and move the photos via the My Files app (or Smart Switch) to the computer drive or flash drive.  You can then just keep them there or upload them to the cloud service of your choice.