[LG V60 ThinQ Guides, News, & Discussion] WeiSheiLindon:
Important: Instructions on how to force google photos to reindex your library and show all information properly can be found at the end.

Google photos is a notoriously broken app on android due to its oversimplification of various processes, such as no manual photo scan feature, no duplicates remover, and a lack of proper EXIF metadata enforcement. I don't know if it's the same on other brands of phones, so I'm posting this here, but hopefully this will find well the power users of google photos.

I have a large library of photos from my various travels over the past few years using smartphones. (I really only started taking pictures seriously in 2020) My library amounts to 3072 photos and videos, or 57GB. This isn't nearly as much as people who've been taking pictures for longer, and especially professional photographers, but it does pose a challenge for indexing. Google photos is not a program I perceive to be designed for the power user, which in this case I am. Because of this it's very easy to confuse it. Simply removing your microSD card, adding pictures to it, and reinserting it into the phone can cause google photos to scatter your photos and videos across different days, meaning that pictures from any given day will be scattered across multiple, this is first seen when pictures you've taken on the day of transferring show under the "Yesterday" heading, despite showing the proper date under the information tab. Included are some screenshots with a demonstration of this. (These screenshots were taken on March 13th, 2023)

I've spent around 3 hours last night (March 13th, 2023) and today (March 14th, 2023) attempting to solve the problem, and have come up with a temporary solution. If this issue happens to you, here are the steps to solve it (if your photos are on your internal storage, you'll have to copy them off your phone, delete the folder, and re add them instead of the SD card procedure.)

1. After removing your SD card from your phone to transfer files, either uninstall and reinstall google photos, or clear the app data.

2. Set up google photos as normal. Turn on backup.

3. Transfer the photos and videos you'd like to onto your SD card.

4. Insert the SD card into your phone and restart the phone (On the LG V60 this is required to recognize the SD card after it is ejected or removed. The SIM card is hot swappable, the MicroSD card is not. If you require hot swappable SD cards, consider purchasing a USB-C reader)

5. Wait for google photos to index the contents of the memory card. It may take up to 3 hours depending on the speed of your SD card and the number of photos and videos you have.

6. Check for duplicates. Sometimes google photos will misinterpret the data and re upload it, causing a duplicate to form. This may be more likely to happen if any of your photos are:

• Lacking EXIF metadata.

• Are stored in the HEIC format.

• Already have duplicates - it's more likely to form more.

• Have non-standard file names.

7. Your photo library should be indexed properly now. Scroll through your library and check if it's recognized all photos in google photos as also being stored on your device. If this isn't the case, you may want to let it process your photos for another hour or so.

If anyone has found a more reliable way to do this, feel free to share! I'm hoping this will help anybody struggling with Google photos formatting.