I’ve been a loyal Samsung user for over 10 years, but I’m now seriously considering switching to iPhone — and it’s entirely because of how frustrating Samsung's photo backup and organization system has become.
The Favorites I mark in Samsung Gallery don’t sync when I back them up to Google Photos or save them to my computer or an external drive.
There’s no metadata or tag that keeps those images grouped or flagged, so all that curation work gets lost unless I manually recreate albums and mark them again.
I recently discovered that my Motion Photos (Samsung's version of Live Photos) don’t back up properly either — I have to manually convert each one to an MP4 just to get the video portion saved to an external hard drive. I have thousands of them, and my phone is now so full that I can’t even batch export.
Meanwhile, iPhone users don’t have this problem. Favorites, Live Photos, and albums sync effortlessly across devices and cloud backups — and it’s making me question whether Samsung is still the best platform for long-term photo preservation.
Please consider adding:
The ability to embed Favorites as metadata (EXIF/IPTC or XMP), or sync them across platforms.
A way to easily batch export Motion Photos — including the video portion — without needing to manually convert each one.
Better integration with Google Photos, external drives, or Smart Switch to preserve these features.
I love Samsung hardware and the camera experience, but photo organization and archiving have become an ongoing pain point that’s pushing loyal users like me away
Also, when transferring to your computer or a flash drive, if you open file manager and navigate to tour DCIM folder, your album structure is intact as should your meta data be.
That is the method I use, but the Motion Photos are only showing as jpegs. I've researched this quite a bit and there currently is no solution beside converting each one individually manually to an mp4 file. I've read that the mo4 would be embedded within the transfer and there may be some 3rd party apps that can extract them but I haven't gotten that far yet.
