Xiaomi appears to be planning to discontinue the Gallery Sync feature of Xiaomi Cloud. A developer named Kacper Skrzypek found a draught announcement for this. However, the company hasn’t made it official yet.
Xiaomi Gallery stops syncing and moves to Google Photos
For those who are unfamiliar, Gallery Sync provided Xiaomi users with 5GB of free cloud storage that could be used to store photos and videos. But if this is your first time hearing about it, don’t be concerned. Those who do use the feature will apparently be able to transfer their photos and videos to Google Photos. If you don’t want to do that, you can download a copy to keep on your computer instead.
Xiaomi will cancel subscriptions and issue a full refund for Gallery Sync’s paid version, which provides users with more storage. The draught announcement uses placeholder dates (“XXXX 2022”), so it’s unclear when Gallery Sync will be discontinued, but it appears to be this year. Other Xiaomi Cloud Services (such as syncing and backing up contacts, messages, and notes) will continue to function normally. It’s also possible that Gallery Sync will continue to operate in China, but this hasn’t been confirmed.
Here is a picture that explains how the photo transfer will work:
XiaomiuiOnce the official announcement is made, you should download or transfer your data as soon as possible because it appears that Xiaomi will only keep the data until 2023 and then delete it. According to the announcement, “we offer a way to download Gallery data stored in Xiaomi Cloud to your personal device.”The data download will be available until X, X, 2023, after which it will be decommissioned.
The original announcement was available here, but it has since been removed. Again, the shutdown’s timing is unknown, and it appears to be different in each region.
