Gallery Sync with Onedrive Album sync Bug

[The_Real_Dirty_Dan]

I have an issue with the "Albums to sync" feature in the Gallery Sync with Onedrive settings. The toggles don't seem to be respected. I will create a new album in the Samsung Gallery, it will have the toggle off in albums to sync. I then move a photo to this new album, confirming the toggle is still off. But when I check OneDrive app in the Samsung Gallery/DCIM folder, the new album is uploaded with the photo. The expected behavior is that albums not set to sync should never be uploaded. I want to keep albums to stay in local storage only and not take up cloud space, but this is not happening. I've tried clearing cache and data from both apps. I've made sure both are up to date. I've tried restarting my phone. But the issue persists.

Can anyone recreate this problem or know how to fix this? 

[The_Real_Dirty_Dan]

My current guess is that because I move a photo from an album that is already synced, the photo itself is a synced file, which overrides the albums "don't sync" setting. I don't see a way of reversing the photos cloud status other than copying the photo into the new album, and deleting the original.

[The_Real_Dirty_Dan]

As an update, I think my guess is correct, that once synced, the photo becomes "cloud managed" regardless of if it moves to a nonsync folder or not. Chatgpt helped come up with a workaround, which is to turn off wifi, assuming sync during wifi only is set, and then using My Files, move the photo to the non sync folder. What will happen is it will break the cloud managed connection of the file and form two copies. One will be non synced in the non synced folder, and there will still remain a cloud-only version in the original folder. You can delete the cloud only version and still retain the nonsynced version with all the original Metadata.

[BotMeister]

It looks like you're right. I, too, have noticed this behavior and been puzzled by it, so I figured I would try to reproduce your issue. I created a new folder and added an image to it, neither of which had yet been uploaded to OneDrive, and I noticed this message that appeared in Gallery > Settings > Sync to OneDrive > Folders to Sync.

[The_Real_Dirty_Dan]

Nice catch. I never noticed this message before. Looking at it now I feel very silly.

[BotMeister]

You and me both. Never read it until today 😂

[BotMeister]

In case the screenshot doesn't display, it says,

"Select albums on your phone to sync with OneDrive. Once photos and videos from these albums are synced, they'll stay saved on OneDrive even if you stop syncing the albums or stop syncing with OneDrive."

So, once an image is uploaded/synced to OneDrive, it becomes like the proverbial Hotel California. You can download it anytime you like, but you can never unsync it.

As you mentioned, you have to download the image from OneDrive, turn off Wi-Fi or move it to an SD card or external drive, delete the uploaded copy from OneDrive, and then move the local copy back to Internal Storage into an unsynced folder.