Samsung Gallery drops OneDrive for Google Photos backup

Samsung Gallery has quietly replaced Microsoft's OneDrive with Google as the engine behind its cloud backup. The change arrives in an update to the Gallery Cloud Sync app that is rolling out to Galaxy phones and tablets, and it restores the built-in backup that vanished when Samsung ended its OneDrive integration earlier this year.

Samsung's Gallery Cloud Sync page now describes a service that backs up photos, videos and albums to the cloud using Google services and keeps them synchronised across a user's devices. The page is specific about where that data lives: photos, videos, album information and metadata are held in the user's own Google account storage, not on Samsung's servers.

What changes on 30 September

The deadline comes from Microsoft. Its OneDrive support note states that from 30 September 2026 Samsung Gallery will no longer sync directly with OneDrive, and that new users will not be able to link the two apps at all. Anyone still relying on the Samsung-to-OneDrive pipeline needs a different backup method switched on to keep new photos safe; everything already uploaded stays reachable through the OneDrive app.

For Galaxy owners the practical effect is a like-for-like swap rather than a brand new feature. Gallery keeps its albums, its multi-device sync and its background backup, but the storage moves from one account to another. Google Photos users get a tidier route out of the camera roll, while OneDrive users are being asked to migrate.

Our opinion

Samsung never explained the OneDrive divorce particularly well, and this replacement lands only weeks before the old integration is switched off, which is a tight window for anyone who does not read support pages. Still, Google Photos is the better long-term home for a Galaxy camera roll, and narrowing Samsung's own cloud commitments makes commercial sense. The annoyance here is the timing, not the destination.