Your gallery favorites are not in your backup
The star you tap is stored in a database on your phone, not inside the photo. Back up, switch phones, or clear the wrong cache and every star is gone while the photos remain. Favorites Gallery copies only the photos you starred, and writes the rating into the file so it cannot happen again.
In testing now. One email at launch, and nothing else.
What a normal backup actually keeps
Every mainstream backup tool copies files. Your favorite star is not part of a file, so it is not part of the copy.
Survives the trip
- The image itself, at full quality
- Date taken, camera, and exposure, stored as EXIF
- GPS coordinates, in most cases
Left behind
- Every favorite star, without exception
- Which photos you chose out of the thousands you did not
- Years of quiet curation, in one transfer
Worth being clear about the scale of the problem: your photos are not at risk here. Losing the flag never means losing pictures. What it costs you is knowing which pictures mattered. The full explanation is here.
What Favorites Gallery does instead
One narrow job, done properly.
Finds what you already starred
It reads the favorites flag straight from Android, the same one your Gallery app uses. Nothing to tag, sort, or move into a special album first.
Writes the rating into the file
Each JPEG copy gets an embedded five-star XMP rating, so the choice you made becomes part of the photo instead of a flag sitting next to it.
Frees space only once verified
It reports what actually arrived at the destination, folder by folder, and offers to release space only against those files. Originals are never touched.
Why an embedded rating is the whole point
XMP is a two decade old standard for storing information inside an image file, including a zero to five star rating.
Because the rating lives in the same bytes as the picture, it travels wherever the photo goes. Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, digiKam, XnView and Windows File Explorer all read it with no setup. Copy the file to a different drive, a different operating system, or a machine that does not exist yet, and it still says five stars. A database flag describes a photo from the outside and can vanish without the photo changing. An embedded rating is part of the photo, and the only way to lose it is to lose the photo.
Reading on backups and favorites
The mechanics, the troubleshooting, and the methods that actually hold up.
Why Your Gallery Favorites Disappear When You Back Up Your Photos
You starred a few hundred photos out of twenty thousand. Then you moved to a new phone and every star was gone, even though the photos came across fine. Here is the reason, and what actually preserves a favorite.
Samsung Gallery Favorites Disappeared? Work Through This First
The Favorites album shows nothing while thousands of photos sit safely in your gallery. Some causes are recoverable in under a minute. Others are not recoverable at all, and it is worth knowing which is which before you spend an afternoon on it.
How to Back Up Only Your Favorite Photos on Android
Backing up twenty thousand photos to protect four hundred is a poor trade. Here are the realistic ways to back up only what you starred, compared honestly, including the manual method that works but nobody sustains.
Questions worth answering first
What does Favorites Gallery actually do?
Why do I need this when Google Photos already backs everything up?
Does it change my original photos?
Which phones does it work on?
Where does it back up to?
Get one email when it launches
Favorites Gallery is in testing on real devices. Leave your address and you will hear from us once, when you can actually download it.