How Favorites Gallery works

Four steps, one of which is the entire point. Everything else is plumbing around getting the rating inside the file.

1. 1It reads the same star you tapped

   Android records your favorites in a system database called MediaStore. Favorites Gallery queries that field directly, which is the same source your Gallery app reads. There is nothing to tag, sort, or move into a special album first. Star a photo today and the app knows about it.

2. 2It writes the rating into the file

   Before a photo leaves your device, the app embeds an XMP five-star rating and a Favorite label into the copy. That is the step that makes this durable: the rating becomes part of the same bytes as the picture, so it survives a new phone, a factory reset, and any software you open it with later. JPEG photos get the embedded rating. Videos are backed up too, and are copied through unchanged.

3. 3It uploads to storage you own

   Files go from your phone straight to your own cloud account. They do not pass through our servers and we keep no copies. Folders are organised by when and where photos were taken, so the backup is browsable rather than one undifferentiated pile.

4. 4It frees space only against what it verified

   After a backup the app reports what it actually confirmed arrived, folder by folder, with counts. Space is only offered for release against those confirmed files. Your originals are never removed unless you explicitly ask, and even then it only ever removes its own copies.

What it does not do

It is not a replacement for backing up your whole library, and it does not try to be. If you have no full backup at all, set one up as well. Favorites Gallery solves a narrower problem that full backups leave untouched, which is that the curation itself is not part of what gets backed up. It also cannot recover favorites you have already lost, because those flags were never written into your photos. There is nothing in the files to read back.

Requirements

• Android 11 or later, which is when the standard favorites field was introduced.
• Any gallery app that uses that standard field, Samsung Gallery included.
• A cloud account of your own. SmugMug is supported today.