A powerful new Google photographs feature could be available soon, not only preventing users from mistakenly deleting photographs, but also saving a significant amount of time when managing cloud storage quotas.

Assemble Debug, a prominent Android investigator, noticed that the newest version (6.87) of the Google Photos Android app has code for a new option called “Undo Backup for this device.” As the name suggests, selecting this option will delete all images and videos backed up from the current device to Google images in the cloud, but will not delete any copies kept locally.

Google Photos Undo Backup for This Device: Why Is It Required?

This is a much-needed improvement because, without it, any photographs manually deleted from Google Photos online are also erased locally on all synced devices. This can result in consumers unintentionally deleting all copies of their photographs when they only intended to delete those backed up on Google’s servers online. Users may choose to do this for privacy reasons or, more likely, to free up space from their online storage quotas.

If automatic backup is not enabled in Google Photos, current versions of the app will continually remind users to enable it. Unfortunately, the only option to prevent these annoying questions from recurring is to enable automatic backup. Any users who are enticed to test it may end up uploading a big number of photographs and videos, consuming significant quantities of data and storage space.

Unfortunately, reversing the process is complicated and time-consuming. Simply turning off backup will not remove any pictures from cloud storage that have already been backed up; in order to do so, local copies of the pictures must be backed up somewhere else before removing them from Google Photos, as deleting them from the cloud will also delete the local copies.

This new “Undo backup for this device” option would provide an easy, and much-needed, way to reverse the backup operation and return to where you started, without destroying any photos on your phone.

Undo Backup For This Device is an unreleased function that is not yet enabled in the app, and there is no assurance it will be. However, the availability of the code and the importance of the functionality indicate that it will be released to users shortly. To increase security, I recommend utilizing Google Takeout on a regular basis to download and save a copy of any essential photographs and videos stored in Google photographs.