Some Pixel phones are exhibiting strange behavior that’s been causing people to lose their photos. A handful of Reddit users have posted recently that pictures taken on their Pixel phones got “lost,” not appearing in local storage or backed up in Google Photos.
A couple of months back, user Blazgamer posted on the r/GooglePixel subreddit that photos they’d taken on a trip failed to appear Pixel 9. Earlier today, user portmafia9719 described a similar experience on Pixel 10 Pro. It’s not clear what’s happening to these photos, but a common thread seems to be that the pictures turned up missing after a lingering notification that said photos were being processed in the background.
An older Reddit post by an account that’s since been deleted tells a similar story, and commenters say they’ve seen the same behavior on Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10, Pixel 9a, and Pixel 8a. It seems many of the affected users may have run into the issue after taking a lot of photos in a short time span, and multiple users report finding unusual .JPG files in their phones’ DCIM folders, all with “pending” in their names and all showing file sizes of zero bytes.
It’s important to stress that, as is often the case with issues like these, it’s hard to tell how widespread the problem is. Anecdotally, I’ve taken thousands of photos with my Pixel 9 Pro, and I’ve never lost any in the way these posts on Reddit describe. Still, plenty of affected users say the photos they’re missing were of important events — a concert, a birthday, a wedding party, and a vacation, in just this handful of posts. The people this has happened to seem understandably put out by the experience.