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What's the current recommended way of getting your photos out from Google Photos? And I don't mean manually via Google Takeout (that's a dumpster fire and doesn

by tauntz 6y ago

What's the current recommended way of getting your photos out from Google Photos? And I don't mean manually via Google Takeout (that's a dumpster fire and doesn't work most of the time) but I'd like to automate it for periodic backups. You never know when you Google Account might be killed, taking tens of years of pictures and videos with it :(

oh_sigh 6y ago
Why rely on google photos in the first place? If you are taking photos with android devices, you can backup the device folder containing the photos/videos. Also, I just tried google checkout, and it took about 30 seconds to schedule a google photos only every-2-months-for-a-year recurring takeout of my data. We'll see if it actually works...if it does, it isn't so bad.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- CraigJPerry 6y ago
  There’s a subset of users who click the takeout button, get the message saying we’ll email you in a bit and then... nothing. If you’re affected it’s not possible to get help from Google according to Mike Elgin. I did a full export (circa 8Gb) around 18 months ago and i have around 1,000 pictures of someone else’s in my archives. I suppose other people have some of my pictures too.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    With the whole self isolation thing going on currently it's actually nice to see another face again every now and then. :-)
  - blackoil 6y ago
    Were the photos shared with you? or a security hole leaking private photos of random people??
    - CraigJPerry 6y ago
      It’s just under 1,000 photos of various landscapes but they’re not landscapes i’ve seen IRL and the smoking gun is the EXIF data shows they were taken on a Canon camera. I’ve only ever had Nikon or Fuji. There’s a bunch of other small things that initially roused my suspicions that these weren’t my photos: Whoever took the photos kept all the photos they took, there are sequences of 50+ photos of the exact same thing, I never save the extra shots, i always just choose the one i want to keep and discard the rest at import time. It’s possible they were shared photos but my gut feeling is no. The photos date from around the time i was a heavy user of google photos, well i was a heavy user of picasa anyway and used gphotos as a backup. I would definitely have spotted these photos if they were in my collection back then.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  It's simple to use and cheap. It's like comparing Dropbox and a FTP server. Also Google Photos has a nice search feature with machine learning behind. I can search things such as "beach name of family member or "classic car" and it works.
  - loloquwowndueo 6y ago
    It cannot distinguish between two black dogs (different breeds, different sizes) so if I want to filter for pictures of only one of the dogs I’m out of luck.
    - KMnO4 6y ago
      Does the service provided in the OP (or any other free service) distinguish between two black dogs?
emilburzo 6y ago
I use rclone[1] to do a daily local backup, just in case. [1] https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
olliebennett 6y ago
Be aware that Google Photos' API does not provide geolocation (lat/long) information from the photos; it's wiped. AFAIK The only way to get the photos with all metadata intact is to use Google Takeout.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wscott 6y ago
I use gphotos-sync: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync Run nightly
nerbert 6y ago
What’s wrong with google takeout? I’ve transferred everything to iCloud without any issue.
- tauntz 6y ago
  I'd say about 90% of the time I get the dreaded "However, we were unable to create a copy of all your files" message in the takeout email. After multiple retries, it eventually succeeds but it's a manual process and using this for regular backups is extremely time consuming and frustrating. Going through the process just once is definitely doable though :)
- aheckler 6y ago
  Can I ask how exactly you went about doing that? I would like to try iCloud for photos, but how did you manage to combine the image files Takeout gives to you with the metadata in the JSON files?
daehee 6y ago
Check out this google photos export tool by the perkeep team: https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp > This program uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol to drive a Chrome session that downloads your photos stored in Google Photos. By default, it starts at the most ancient item in the library, and progresses towards the most recent. It can be run incrementally, as it keeps track of the last item that was downloaded. It only works with the main library for now, i.e. it does not support the photos moved to Archive, or albums. For each downloaded photo, an external program can be run on it (with the -run flag) right after it is downloaded to e.g. upload it somewhere else.

by tauntz 6y ago

oh_sigh 6y ago

Why rely on google photos in the first place? If you are taking photos with android devices, you can backup the device folder containing the photos/videos. Also, I just tried google checkout, and it took about 30 seconds to schedule a google photos only every-2-months-for-a-year recurring takeout of my data. We'll see if it actually works...if it does, it isn't so bad.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CraigJPerry 6y ago
There’s a subset of users who click the takeout button, get the message saying we’ll email you in a bit and then... nothing. If you’re affected it’s not possible to get help from Google according to Mike Elgin. I did a full export (circa 8Gb) around 18 months ago and i have around 1,000 pictures of someone else’s in my archives. I suppose other people have some of my pictures too.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  With the whole self isolation thing going on currently it's actually nice to see another face again every now and then. :-)
- blackoil 6y ago
  Were the photos shared with you? or a security hole leaking private photos of random people??
  - CraigJPerry 6y ago
    It’s just under 1,000 photos of various landscapes but they’re not landscapes i’ve seen IRL and the smoking gun is the EXIF data shows they were taken on a Canon camera. I’ve only ever had Nikon or Fuji. There’s a bunch of other small things that initially roused my suspicions that these weren’t my photos: Whoever took the photos kept all the photos they took, there are sequences of 50+ photos of the exact same thing, I never save the extra shots, i always just choose the one i want to keep and discard the rest at import time. It’s possible they were shared photos but my gut feeling is no. The photos date from around the time i was a heavy user of google photos, well i was a heavy user of picasa anyway and used gphotos as a backup. I would definitely have spotted these photos if they were in my collection back then.
speedgoose 6y ago
It's simple to use and cheap. It's like comparing Dropbox and a FTP server. Also Google Photos has a nice search feature with machine learning behind. I can search things such as "beach name of family member or "classic car" and it works.
- loloquwowndueo 6y ago
  It cannot distinguish between two black dogs (different breeds, different sizes) so if I want to filter for pictures of only one of the dogs I’m out of luck.
  - KMnO4 6y ago
    Does the service provided in the OP (or any other free service) distinguish between two black dogs?

emilburzo 6y ago

I use rclone[1] to do a daily local backup, just in case. [1] https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/

olliebennett 6y ago

Be aware that Google Photos' API does not provide geolocation (lat/long) information from the photos; it's wiped. AFAIK The only way to get the photos with all metadata intact is to use Google Takeout.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

wscott 6y ago

I use gphotos-sync: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync Run nightly

nerbert 6y ago

What’s wrong with google takeout? I’ve transferred everything to iCloud without any issue.

tauntz 6y ago
I'd say about 90% of the time I get the dreaded "However, we were unable to create a copy of all your files" message in the takeout email. After multiple retries, it eventually succeeds but it's a manual process and using this for regular backups is extremely time consuming and frustrating. Going through the process just once is definitely doable though :)
aheckler 6y ago
Can I ask how exactly you went about doing that? I would like to try iCloud for photos, but how did you manage to combine the image files Takeout gives to you with the metadata in the JSON files?

daehee 6y ago

Check out this google photos export tool by the perkeep team: https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp > This program uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol to drive a Chrome session that downloads your photos stored in Google Photos. By default, it starts at the most ancient item in the library, and progresses towards the most recent. It can be run incrementally, as it keeps track of the last item that was downloaded. It only works with the main library for now, i.e. it does not support the photos moved to Archive, or albums. For each downloaded photo, an external program can be run on it (with the -run flag) right after it is downloaded to e.g. upload it somewhere else.