Samsung kills Gallery Sync and Drive support in favor of OneDrive

By Sean Endicott
published

Samsung dropped some of its cloud features and decided to rely on OneDrive instead.

Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Microsoft Apps
Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Microsoft Apps (Image credit: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Samsung is ending support for Gallery Sync and Drive storage.
  • Data from these sources can be migrated to OneDrive or downloaded for some time.
  • The termination of the features will occur over a phased rollout with dates varying based on your region.

Samsung's Gallery Sync and Drive storage for My Files will no longer be supported by Samsung Cloud (via Neowin). Anyone with a premium storage subscription plan will have it canceled beginning April 1, 2021, and might receive a refund. Samsung isn't leaving its customers without cloud storage options, however, as the same features will soon be supported by Microsoft OneDrive rather than Samsung Cloud.

The transition from Samsung Cloud to OneDrive will happen gradually. Samsung breaks down the shutdown process on a support page. The shutdown process will occur in two groups, separated depending on the country that you first signed up for a Samsung account from.

Samsung first rolled out gallery integration with OneDrive toward the end of last year. The feature natively integrates the photo gallery of supported Samsung phones with OneDrive.

If you have data within Gallery Sync or Drive, you can save it in a couple of ways. You can either migrate it over to OneDrive or download the data to a mobile device or PC. Samsung notes that if you migrate or download your data that the cloud versions of the content may be deleted before the official end date.

The rollout is relatively complex, with two groups being spread across three different phases of termination. The first phase of the shutdown stops new registrations for these deprecated services. The next phase discontinues the use of existing Gallery Sync and Drive registrations and the end of OneDrive migration support. The final phase sees the end of data download support. The exact dates of each of these phases depends on your region.

Samsung's support page has a tool to determine which group you are in and outlines all of the relevant dates for the phased shutdown.

While Gallery Sync and Drive support is ending, you will still be able to back up and sync contacts, calendars, and notes to Samsung Cloud.

Sean Endicott
Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

15 Comments
  • This might entice me to return to Samsung.... just kill off Bixby too please....
  • That's not very nice! Bixby is pretty descent to me. Alot of very useful features.
  • I would like Bixby more, if it worked on my GS 3. Samsung needs to fix this issue. On the phone, I don't have any issues for what I use it for.
  • I also use Bixby instead of the Google Crap Assistant .... Bixby is much more lovely... but to be honest also a bit dumber
  • At least there is no more annoying dedicated Bixby button. First thing I did was to make the "side button" the power button again. I then disabled it elsewhere so I don't have to use it.
  • @laevanay you can disable it via settings lol. Some folks actually find bixby to be decent. The world is bigger than your bubble lol.
  • I hope they don't break the normal OneDrive sync like linking with OneDrive did. It was a pain to get my OneDrive syncing back to normal after that mistake of an implementation.
  • Yeah It stop OneDrive camera roll upload, I had to have them take it off for me
  • I had this advertised in the Files app and gave it a shot. Beware: it doesn't support SD card syncing and it disables the OneDrive app's built-in camera sync. It doesn't allow you to use both at the same time. You're better off just using OneDrive's camera sync.
  • Why is synch off by default? I had to enable One Dive synch on two phones.
  • Hmmm I wonder if they will ditch the kb, mail, notepad apps for the Microsoft versions soon to.
  • So is this the one drive sync in galary are they killing or something else
  • Good. It was gimmicky and insecure.
  • I'm ok with that! OneDrive is and always has been killer! First thing I did after the feature hit...i enabled OneDrive in the gallery!
  • Yes!!! Smart move, and win for MS!