When I was young and didn’t know much about using Google, I synced my email and Google photos to the iPad I had at the time and it ate away at a LOT of my gmail storage, so I eventually unsynced the device.

Now, Google photos still send me notifications saying things like “take a look back at March 2018” and if I click it it’ll show me old photos that I’m not sure I have on my phone, but if I open the app independently it’s completely empty, like photos?? Girl you’re not synced we don’t know who you are we don’t have any photos GIRL YES YOU DO YOU KEEP TELLING ME ABOUT IT JUST GIVR ME MY OLD PHOTOS BACK

I apologise for my frustrations. There’s some old photos I want to save onto my phone but Google is pretending we haven’t known each other for a decade

I am talking about the google photos app on an Android device.

I think, in the past, google photos was showing me, by default, the photos I had uploaded to google.photos. So, when I scrolled down I could see my very old photos, the ones that were not on my device. (And there was also a "Photos on device" section, in which I could see the photos on my device, in various albums/folders, like the normal gallery app)

But now I can only see the photos on my device. (I can indeed see my google photos albums, from "Library", with images that are only online). This might have happened when I got a new phone.

How can I set Google photos to show me, by default, the images stored online, and not on the device?

Thanks!

Edit: Thanks for the help. I ended up uninstalling and reinstall it. Now it shows the online photos, but looks like it's very buggy if I too far into the past :)