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How to Move Your Google Photos

136 points by Leftium 3y ago

Leftium 3y ago
This seems to be the best way to move photos + videos from a (university) Google account to another account. I don't have an auckland.ac.nz Google account, but my university also suddenly changed my unlimited storage to 20GB. There must be an upcoming hard deadline for all Google Workspace for Education admins to reduce storage usage.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  > There must be an upcoming hard deadline for all Google Workspace for Education admins to reduce storage usage. https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechanges.html https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechange... explains: "Recent changes in Google’s policies worldwide mean they will no longer be providing the University and other educational institutes with free, unlimited Google Drive storage."
  - coldtrait 3y ago
    Happened to my university account (I'm alumni now). They got rid of Google Drive entirely and Calendar entirely from Google's Workspace suit. It was unlimited Drive storage before this which was so convenient.
sMarsIntruder 3y ago
This guide tells you to delete the JSON file that are crucial for both geotag info and in general EXIF. I don’t recall the script I used last time, but GitHub is pretty full of good Samaritans, eg: https://github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif https://github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif
- urbandw311er 3y ago
  It’s pretty dark that Google doesn’t release your photos back to you in a way that makes it easy for ordinary folk to migrate to another provider.
  - gsa 3y ago
    To play the devil's advocate, this is likely an artifact of how they store the images. Embedded EXIF does not make for an efficient filesize and separating EXIF from image data means they can have different image sizes with a single source of EXIF data.
    - urbandw311er 3y ago
      I think that’s a fair point, but then one could argue the onus should be on them to “reconstitute” the files before export by merging the EXIF back in.
      - qmarchi 3y ago
        I mean the point is that you can get it out, the JSON export just happens to be the easiest way for them. It's even GDPR compliant.
        urbandw311er 3y ago
        It’s one thing for a techy to get it out and know how to mash it all back together but quite another for my mum, for example, who would find it potentially an insurmountable blocker to changing her cloud storage provider.
    - poorlyknit 3y ago
      Honest question (I don't know much about about EXIF), but wouldn't the metadata be peanuts compared to the actual image data?
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  Json takes up barely any space, so long term storage isn't a problem unless you are pedantic about adding a few extra megabytes compared to your terrabytes of photos. I recently went through all my Google Photos photos, downloaded everything to physical drives, and then deleted the 80% that are just redundant. I found that selecting photos in batches of months or days, making sure that each batch is less than (Thot Shalt Not Download More Than) 500 images, then downloading in google photos was more reliable than Google takeout, which had a very high rate of download failure. On the topic of seemingly redundant files, what I got back was a bunch of useless .MP files, but a little sleuthing revealed these to be top shot motion videos. https://support.google.com/googlecamera/answer/9937175?hl=en https://support.google.com/googlecamera/answer/9937175?hl=en I guess Google has a licence issue with publishing trillions of .mp4 files, or changes their extension to .MP for some internal purpose. But the upshot is a horrible user experience, many thousands of users will be left scratching their heads before throwing these videos of cherished memories away. Anyway, if you want to batch rename any .MP files on Windows: Navigate to their folder and enter cmd into the file path field, in the terminal rename the extensions using: ren *.MP *.mp4
- extr 3y ago
  I just recently did Google Takeout to duplicate my backup into iCloud and I found the EXIF data in the files to be 100% there, down to the GPS location and lens the photo was taken with. I've been wondering if the different experiences are related to the "Original Size" setting in Google Photos. I've always stored things at original size since originally using Google Photos years ago. I'm wondering if the compression they do when not using this option causes the EXIF data to only exist in the JSONs.
ianschmitz 3y ago
I’m working through moving from google to apple photos. It’s not straight forward, but this tool is fantastic: https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper
- 303uru 3y ago
  Don't forget to fix the dates: https://github.com/laurentlbm/google-photos-takeout-date-fixer https://github.com/laurentlbm/google-photos-takeout-date-fix...
- sneva 3y ago
  > GPS data: ~~from JSON to Exif - Thank you @DalenW still thank you, but it~~ is now missing in the Dart version It seems that it doesn’t parse the GPS data anymore.
- danielhep 3y ago
  Apple Photos is almost impossible to get all your photos out of.
  - nullwarp 3y ago
    Absolute nightmare. Took me two weeks to help someone get their data out of icloud. I can't imagine fighting to get my photos out of Google only to put them in something even worse. Madness
elkos 3y ago
Would love it if there was an easy way to move Google Photos in a Nextcloud Instance
- MRPockets 3y ago
  I have not used it myself, but Nextcloud does have a Google importer tool that includes Photos import - https://nextcloud.com/blog/easy-migration-to-nextcloud-from-insecure-and-privacy-unfriendly-platforms-now-available/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/easy-migration-to-nextcloud-from-.... It looks like the tool is basically in maintenance mode currently which should mean it works reasonably well - https://github.com/nextcloud/integration_google https://github.com/nextcloud/integration_google.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I had the Photos metadata on Apple Photos, so I intended to delete and free up space on Google Photos. We are no longer using it as a backup but have kept it for other friends and families who are still on Google. I went through the process, and Google didn’t make it easy. I wrote about it at https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get-off-google-photos/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
Snuupy 3y ago
I wrote a guide here: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1340 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1340
eterps 3y ago
rclone supports Google Photos as well: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/ https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
- chromozonex 3y ago
  Interestingly it doesn’t support downloading from google photos at full original quality. Wouldn’t this somewhat limit the utility of this tool to move to another service?
  - eterps 3y ago
    Good point, thanks.
  - phantomathkg 3y ago
    It is because Google limit their API see the bug [1] and Google "Product Expert" even created a site about it [2]. [1] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115?pli=1 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115?pli=1 [2] https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/google-photos-1/how-to-download-all-autobackupped-pictures https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/google-photos-...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kristopolous 3y ago
Why move them? Has something new happened with Google photos beyond the traditional critiques of Google products?
- buro9 3y ago
  You didn't read the article, it's in the subtitle and the article itself... it's also in the domain name (.ac.). These are academic accounts on Google that are granted to students only whilst they are students of the institution. The account is ephemeral and you will lose all data within the account. Nothing is implying the students used these for personal purposes either, these could be photos of blackboards / whiteboards, photos of handouts, photos of the class, etc. Though it is likely that all photos taken are in the academic account as I doubt anyone is switching the Google Photos account and managing what's on the phone.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    > You didn't read the article, it's in the subtitle and the article itself... it's also in the domain name (.ac.). > These are academic accounts on Google that are granted to students only whilst they are students of the institution. The account is ephemeral and you will lose all data within the account. Or more accurately: So far they didn't have to care, now they do, and because they can't filter down accounts more gracefully than "if too large, delete everything" (instead of just photos and drive), they tell people how to reduce the amount of data they store in the Google account. See https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechanges.html https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechange...
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    The motivation isn't explained. That assumption isn't laid out
- midasz 3y ago
  I've got kids so I'll never use a Google product for any pictures of them. Degoogling myself 1 service at a time as well.
senectus1 3y ago
dammit this is on my list of crap i have to do. problem is i need to get 4 peoples accounts off google photo's and onto my synology drive.
- dakial1 3y ago
  That makes 2 of us. My main challenge here is that I have 1.5T of photos in Google Photos and downloading them through takeout is very very cumbersome. I am after a download manager that would help me dowload them directly to Synology, but the whole credential system from Google Photos makes it very hard to do so...
  - pierat 3y ago
    And I'm glad I ONLY have the "free" 15GB plan. Even getting 8GB of images is stupid hard. Either you get lossy, lose EXIF, Takeout doesn't backup, etc. And to think people have 1.5TB of data in that roach motel? I would need something stupid simple like "copy to S3", or "make long URL path with index of links".
    - dakial1 3y ago
      You don't actually lose the EXIF, they just send you in a different format (why would they make it easier right?). There are some programs that can do this sync.
  - cwillu 3y ago
    Expect to have some fun when it's time to delete them. There appears to be a timeout on the deletion process, so trying to delete too many at a time will fail.
buro9 3y ago
If you use Google takeout to export your photos you get a lossy version of the original. IIUC the only way to get the original photo is to click on each individual photo in the web app and choose to "Download original", there is no other way. If you do use the Google Takeout approach you will need to re-stitch the JSON and EXIF back together via one of the tools mentioned elsewhere on this page. Lesson: if you care about your photos do not _only_ use Google Photos as the place to store them, put Syncthing on your phone and sync photos directly to your laptop / NAS and treat that as the primary location. Google Photos is a convenient viewer, nothing more.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  I think you're wrong. Only those you download via Google Photos API (think: rclone) suffer from that "feature". EDIT: I think Google Photos API "only" strips EXIF. Seen on: https://github.com/daneroo/gphotos-puppeteer https://github.com/daneroo/gphotos-puppeteer
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > If you use Google takeout to export your photos you get a lossy version of the original. I'm fairly sure that, unless something has changed recently, this is incorrect. Last year I went through the process of figuring out how to re-create my photos from a takeout archive. It is frustrating to a level that is almost cruel - mangled/truncated filenames, arbitrarily stripped metadata, unnecessarily ambiguous naming - but the photos themselves always seemed to be original quality. I've recently started using the filters and tools that come with a Google One subscription and I suspect that they're not fully compatible with whatever the storage schema is that takeout is exposing. The relationship between an original image and one edited uaing the filters seems to get lost. I need to dig into this before my next semi-annual photo exfiltration is due. Actually, I just need to stop using google photos...
Podgajski 3y ago
As a post semi professional photographer, I want to go on a divergent path here for a moment. As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. Second, never ever ever use any cloud based back up unless you are just using it for a back up of your multiple hard drive backups. In essence, if she only be a back up of your back ups. And never a back up of your daily workflow. In my opinion, we are heading for a time of fiscal turmoil that will either make these cloud backups too expensive or obsolete.
- davidy123 3y ago
  I don't know who this mysterious person who would want to see my photos in 50 years is, but I keep photos for myself. Storage is cheap enough that I really don't worry about paying for it, and I don't think that's going to change at my scale. The privacy and control issues are something to worry about, though.
- leokennis 3y ago
  > (...) ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now If you have any guiding principles based on which to answer this question, I'd love to know them. There is one photo in existence of my great-grandfather. That makes it the most interesting photo of him by default. There are hundreds of photos of my son. Which one(s) should be preserved so my great-grandchildren in 2123 can still see them?
  - Podgajski 3y ago
    Several people, for example, have 5 to 20 photos of their son or family at the same outing. It’s those redundant photograph I’m talking about mostly. I would say, keep the photos with the most context, look in the backgrounds of photos for items, and things that are interesting, not just the main subject. A photo of a person standing in a field would be much different than a person in a photo sitting inside of a house That they own. And you are right, I think the rarity of the photos is what makes them more beautiful, more valuable.
robertlacok 3y ago
There's an important thing that is easy to miss if you just use a Google Takeout for the export – your Shared albums will only contain pictures that you yourself added! I went through this journey a few months ago, and it's pretty hard to catch because those albums will appear in the export, and they are not empty, so you don't expect that they are partial exports. The way to export them was going one by one in the regular Google Photos app, and downloading each album as a ZIP – that way you get pictures also from other contributors to that album. Funnily enough, I also experienced some rate limiting and had to wait a few minutes after every 6-7 albums. My end goal was importing the Takeout into Apple Photos library locally stored on my Mac. Some other steps I had to take were: - Fixing the metadata [0] so they showed up with a correct date - Importing albums first, and the "Stream" (a folder per year) second, because otherwise the deduplication would mean the pictures already in the stream wouldn't get added to an album. [0] https://metadatafixer.com/ https://metadatafixer.com/
- albertzeyer 3y ago
  In a Google Photos shared photo album, there is the button to "save photos [to your library]". I would expect that you need to click that in order to have those pictures being contained in your Google Takeout and your library. Did you do that?
  - mholt 3y ago
    Correct, if you "Save" shared photos to your account then they start using your storage quota and you can download them in Takeout.
- kevincox 3y ago
  > going one by one in the regular Google Photos app, and downloading each album as a ZIP But be careful here. Some files will only be available at reduced quality and have all metadata stripped (even if the owner has elected to share it and it is visible in the web UI). The only way to get the original seems to be to contact the original uploader.
koonsolo 3y ago
Does google takeout work properly for any of you? Maybe I just have too many files on there, but I can't get Takeout to properly export everyting. Not to file, not to Dropbox.
- jimmydddd 3y ago
  Did you find a work around? I have 15 years of family photos on Google. I've had zero complaints but I've always wanted to do a backup in case I ever get locked out of my account like you read about.
darkwater 3y ago
Well well well, for me Google Takeout experience has been pretty bad so far. A couple of years ago I exported all my photos with Takeout, because I wanted to have them locally in my LAN and back them up in BackBlaze. At the same type I set up SyncThing from my phone to my local disk to store and backup new photos and videos without going through Google Photos. But I did leave the "backup" to GPhotos option turned on. Fast forward this year, my (legacy) Google account on which I had most of the photos/videos is now running out of space, so I first reduced the quality of uploaded photos/videos, then completely disabled the backup (I have another cloud backup anyway with Amazon Photos). And then I wanted to stop Google nag and annoy me 3 times a week with the "you almost have no more space in your account, buy Google One ASAP" thing. First thing, I deleted some old shit/videos/attachments I had in GMail from late '00s when Dropbox wasn't a thing yet, but beside some video you quickly realize that photos back in the day were muuuuch smaller. Then I said, OK, I'm going to set a cutoff date for GPhotos and manually delete by UI all photos before 2013. I selected all of them, and put the in the "recycle bin". Then my inner sysadmin instincts came in and said: "hey, did you check that you have on disk and Backblaze those photos?". And behold! they WERE NOT THERE! I had the Takeout output saved as a whole (it actually comes as a zipped or targz file back in the day) and sure enough it somehow stopped around 2013. So, I went swiftly to restore the photos/videos from the bin and back to their place, and then triggered a new Google Takeout. A few hours after, I got an email saying that... IT FAILED, and that I need to retry it. Ok... so maybe it's because I just restored the photos from the recycle bin, let's wait a few more days just to be sure. After a week or so I tried again and a few hours after, again a failure email. This was like 2 months ago, I will try again now since I wrote already this wall of text, but, is there anybody that experienced the same? Did you find a way to get your Takeout?
- pierat 3y ago
  > Fast forward this year, my (legacy) Google account on which I had most of the photos/videos is now running out of space, so I first reduced the quality of uploaded photos/videos, then completely disabled the backup (I have another cloud backup anyway with Amazon Photos). And then I wanted to stop Google nag and annoy me 3 times a week with the "you almost have no more space in your account, buy Google One ASAP" thing. You know, when Google came out with Gmail, their top comment was that 'You'd never run out of storage, ever'. That was their advertising reel. And then, on Android, 'back up everything user-content' is turned on. And these days it's to grab as much data as possible, AND to then nag you to death with "your storage is running out". I've got all my emails locally. I'm downloading my images, and what few files in Google docs are already copied. Google is just a corpse being bandied around by advertisers and marketers to be made-believe as real.
teeray 3y ago
> Ctrl+Shift+minus to zoom out on your browser until you can only just see the check mark in the corner of an image Hold shift as you click the first photo Release shift PgDn 20-30 times then find another image, hold shift and click the check mark. They all turn blue down to that point Click the tiny top right bin Click Move to bin This is such an absurd dark pattern to keep you spending more money on Google’s storage.
extr 3y ago
I use a triple strategy of Google Photos (for AI and editing), iCloud (for integration into Apple software), and OneDrive (cheap storage + stores everything as raw files). Occasionally I perform a Google Takeout and keep a hard copy on an external SSD as well. Of the three services, iCloud is by far the most cumbersome and difficult to work with.
greenSunglass 3y ago
On iPhone, I'm using Google Photo as my primary photo backup. Anyone would have a good solution to backup iPhone/iOS files/photos to any cloud (s3, blazer, nas, etc..), NAS, or computer that just work?
- extr 3y ago
  Use OneDrive. Photo backup works in the most "dumb" possible manner, just by dumping every photo as a file into a big folder. And you can pretty seamlessly use it as file storage in lieu of iCloud. And it's absurdly cheap, you get 1TB (+ more if you're willing to create multiple accounts) with O365, along with Word/Excel.
- nullwarp 3y ago
  I use photosync to photoprism and it works great I toss my phone on the wireless charger and it auto uploads them. Best part is unlike trapping my photos in Google or Apple they are just files stored on a disk
mceachen 3y ago
Oof, I’m not being hyperbolic when I say I hope no one follows this guide. Google Photos json files include metadata that Google may have been stripped from the original photo or video. Future You will want that metadata. Just use software that knows about those sidecars (like PhotoStructure). Don’t downscale *anything*—the software to downscale (like Google Photos) may delete metadata (like GPS lat/lon and captured-at time) that you’ll be sad is missing later, and whatever seems to be “too many pixels” now will seem just adequate with display technology a decade from now. Videos are enormous compared to still images, but sounds and motion can convey so much of what and how things were happening in that moment, and can be invaluable, depending on the content. New parents: take more video. It depends need to be long: 5-10 seconds is great. Back to TFA: the suggestion to move your photos back to yet another (free?) cloud service? How does this leave you in a better place than before? External HDDs are down to $18/tb (at least in USA, it can be a bit more elsewhere). Unless you’re regularly taking hour-long videos at 4K/60FPS, most avid photographers don’t take more than 1tb/year. My entire 25 year digital collection is < 2TB. *Keep a local backup of your originals*!
photo_ta 3y ago
Suppose that you download (or transfer to Dropbox) all your photos on Google Photos. Now you want to delete them from the Google service. How are you supposed to do this? To delete photos in the web app, you have to literally click on each individual one to select it. There appears to be literally no way to mass select all your photos to remove them from Google Photos. The Google answer to thousands of people apparently asking how to do this is "you can use the storage management tools to remove some types of files". That is the Google wizard which helps you remove large files, blurry photos, etc.

136 points by Leftium 3y ago

This seems to be the best way to move photos + videos from a (university) Google account to another account. I don't have an auckland.ac.nz Google account, but my university also suddenly changed my unlimited storage to 20GB. There must be an upcoming hard deadline for all Google Workspace for Education admins to reduce storage usage.

pgeorgi 3y ago
> There must be an upcoming hard deadline for all Google Workspace for Education admins to reduce storage usage. https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechanges.html https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechange... explains: "Recent changes in Google’s policies worldwide mean they will no longer be providing the University and other educational institutes with free, unlimited Google Drive storage."
- coldtrait 3y ago
  Happened to my university account (I'm alumni now). They got rid of Google Drive entirely and Calendar entirely from Google's Workspace suit. It was unlimited Drive storage before this which was so convenient.

sMarsIntruder 3y ago

This guide tells you to delete the JSON file that are crucial for both geotag info and in general EXIF. I don’t recall the script I used last time, but GitHub is pretty full of good Samaritans, eg: https://github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif https://github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif

urbandw311er 3y ago
It’s pretty dark that Google doesn’t release your photos back to you in a way that makes it easy for ordinary folk to migrate to another provider.
- gsa 3y ago
  To play the devil's advocate, this is likely an artifact of how they store the images. Embedded EXIF does not make for an efficient filesize and separating EXIF from image data means they can have different image sizes with a single source of EXIF data.
  - urbandw311er 3y ago
    I think that’s a fair point, but then one could argue the onus should be on them to “reconstitute” the files before export by merging the EXIF back in.
    - qmarchi 3y ago
      I mean the point is that you can get it out, the JSON export just happens to be the easiest way for them. It's even GDPR compliant.
      - urbandw311er 3y ago
        It’s one thing for a techy to get it out and know how to mash it all back together but quite another for my mum, for example, who would find it potentially an insurmountable blocker to changing her cloud storage provider.
  - poorlyknit 3y ago
    Honest question (I don't know much about about EXIF), but wouldn't the metadata be peanuts compared to the actual image data?
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
Json takes up barely any space, so long term storage isn't a problem unless you are pedantic about adding a few extra megabytes compared to your terrabytes of photos. I recently went through all my Google Photos photos, downloaded everything to physical drives, and then deleted the 80% that are just redundant. I found that selecting photos in batches of months or days, making sure that each batch is less than (Thot Shalt Not Download More Than) 500 images, then downloading in google photos was more reliable than Google takeout, which had a very high rate of download failure. On the topic of seemingly redundant files, what I got back was a bunch of useless .MP files, but a little sleuthing revealed these to be top shot motion videos. https://support.google.com/googlecamera/answer/9937175?hl=en https://support.google.com/googlecamera/answer/9937175?hl=en I guess Google has a licence issue with publishing trillions of .mp4 files, or changes their extension to .MP for some internal purpose. But the upshot is a horrible user experience, many thousands of users will be left scratching their heads before throwing these videos of cherished memories away. Anyway, if you want to batch rename any .MP files on Windows: Navigate to their folder and enter cmd into the file path field, in the terminal rename the extensions using: ren *.MP *.mp4
extr 3y ago
I just recently did Google Takeout to duplicate my backup into iCloud and I found the EXIF data in the files to be 100% there, down to the GPS location and lens the photo was taken with. I've been wondering if the different experiences are related to the "Original Size" setting in Google Photos. I've always stored things at original size since originally using Google Photos years ago. I'm wondering if the compression they do when not using this option causes the EXIF data to only exist in the JSONs.

ianschmitz 3y ago

I’m working through moving from google to apple photos. It’s not straight forward, but this tool is fantastic: https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper

303uru 3y ago
Don't forget to fix the dates: https://github.com/laurentlbm/google-photos-takeout-date-fixer https://github.com/laurentlbm/google-photos-takeout-date-fix...
sneva 3y ago
> GPS data: ~~from JSON to Exif - Thank you @DalenW still thank you, but it~~ is now missing in the Dart version It seems that it doesn’t parse the GPS data anymore.
danielhep 3y ago
Apple Photos is almost impossible to get all your photos out of.
- nullwarp 3y ago
  Absolute nightmare. Took me two weeks to help someone get their data out of icloud. I can't imagine fighting to get my photos out of Google only to put them in something even worse. Madness

elkos 3y ago

Would love it if there was an easy way to move Google Photos in a Nextcloud Instance

MRPockets 3y ago
I have not used it myself, but Nextcloud does have a Google importer tool that includes Photos import - https://nextcloud.com/blog/easy-migration-to-nextcloud-from-insecure-and-privacy-unfriendly-platforms-now-available/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/easy-migration-to-nextcloud-from-.... It looks like the tool is basically in maintenance mode currently which should mean it works reasonably well - https://github.com/nextcloud/integration_google https://github.com/nextcloud/integration_google.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

I had the Photos metadata on Apple Photos, so I intended to delete and free up space on Google Photos. We are no longer using it as a backup but have kept it for other friends and families who are still on Google. I went through the process, and Google didn’t make it easy. I wrote about it at https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get-off-google-photos/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...

Snuupy 3y ago

I wrote a guide here: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1340 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1340

eterps 3y ago

rclone supports Google Photos as well: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/ https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

chromozonex 3y ago
Interestingly it doesn’t support downloading from google photos at full original quality. Wouldn’t this somewhat limit the utility of this tool to move to another service?
- eterps 3y ago
  Good point, thanks.
- phantomathkg 3y ago
  It is because Google limit their API see the bug [1] and Google "Product Expert" even created a site about it [2]. [1] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115?pli=1 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115?pli=1 [2] https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/google-photos-1/how-to-download-all-autobackupped-pictures https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/google-photos-...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kristopolous 3y ago

Why move them? Has something new happened with Google photos beyond the traditional critiques of Google products?

buro9 3y ago
You didn't read the article, it's in the subtitle and the article itself... it's also in the domain name (.ac.). These are academic accounts on Google that are granted to students only whilst they are students of the institution. The account is ephemeral and you will lose all data within the account. Nothing is implying the students used these for personal purposes either, these could be photos of blackboards / whiteboards, photos of handouts, photos of the class, etc. Though it is likely that all photos taken are in the academic account as I doubt anyone is switching the Google Photos account and managing what's on the phone.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  > You didn't read the article, it's in the subtitle and the article itself... it's also in the domain name (.ac.). > These are academic accounts on Google that are granted to students only whilst they are students of the institution. The account is ephemeral and you will lose all data within the account. Or more accurately: So far they didn't have to care, now they do, and because they can't filter down accounts more gracefully than "if too large, delete everything" (instead of just photos and drive), they tell people how to reduce the amount of data they store in the Google account. See https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechanges.html https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/my-tools/googlechange...
- kristopolous 3y ago
  The motivation isn't explained. That assumption isn't laid out
midasz 3y ago
I've got kids so I'll never use a Google product for any pictures of them. Degoogling myself 1 service at a time as well.

senectus1 3y ago

dammit this is on my list of crap i have to do. problem is i need to get 4 peoples accounts off google photo's and onto my synology drive.

dakial1 3y ago
That makes 2 of us. My main challenge here is that I have 1.5T of photos in Google Photos and downloading them through takeout is very very cumbersome. I am after a download manager that would help me dowload them directly to Synology, but the whole credential system from Google Photos makes it very hard to do so...
- pierat 3y ago
  And I'm glad I ONLY have the "free" 15GB plan. Even getting 8GB of images is stupid hard. Either you get lossy, lose EXIF, Takeout doesn't backup, etc. And to think people have 1.5TB of data in that roach motel? I would need something stupid simple like "copy to S3", or "make long URL path with index of links".
  - dakial1 3y ago
    You don't actually lose the EXIF, they just send you in a different format (why would they make it easier right?). There are some programs that can do this sync.
- cwillu 3y ago
  Expect to have some fun when it's time to delete them. There appears to be a timeout on the deletion process, so trying to delete too many at a time will fail.

buro9 3y ago

If you use Google takeout to export your photos you get a lossy version of the original. IIUC the only way to get the original photo is to click on each individual photo in the web app and choose to "Download original", there is no other way. If you do use the Google Takeout approach you will need to re-stitch the JSON and EXIF back together via one of the tools mentioned elsewhere on this page. Lesson: if you care about your photos do not _only_ use Google Photos as the place to store them, put Syncthing on your phone and sync photos directly to your laptop / NAS and treat that as the primary location. Google Photos is a convenient viewer, nothing more.

fifteen1506 3y ago
I think you're wrong. Only those you download via Google Photos API (think: rclone) suffer from that "feature". EDIT: I think Google Photos API "only" strips EXIF. Seen on: https://github.com/daneroo/gphotos-puppeteer https://github.com/daneroo/gphotos-puppeteer
andyjohnson0 3y ago
> If you use Google takeout to export your photos you get a lossy version of the original. I'm fairly sure that, unless something has changed recently, this is incorrect. Last year I went through the process of figuring out how to re-create my photos from a takeout archive. It is frustrating to a level that is almost cruel - mangled/truncated filenames, arbitrarily stripped metadata, unnecessarily ambiguous naming - but the photos themselves always seemed to be original quality. I've recently started using the filters and tools that come with a Google One subscription and I suspect that they're not fully compatible with whatever the storage schema is that takeout is exposing. The relationship between an original image and one edited uaing the filters seems to get lost. I need to dig into this before my next semi-annual photo exfiltration is due. Actually, I just need to stop using google photos...

Podgajski 3y ago

As a post semi professional photographer, I want to go on a divergent path here for a moment. As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos. To make your life easier before downloading all these photos go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. Second, never ever ever use any cloud based back up unless you are just using it for a back up of your multiple hard drive backups. In essence, if she only be a back up of your back ups. And never a back up of your daily workflow. In my opinion, we are heading for a time of fiscal turmoil that will either make these cloud backups too expensive or obsolete.

davidy123 3y ago
I don't know who this mysterious person who would want to see my photos in 50 years is, but I keep photos for myself. Storage is cheap enough that I really don't worry about paying for it, and I don't think that's going to change at my scale. The privacy and control issues are something to worry about, though.
leokennis 3y ago
> (...) ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now If you have any guiding principles based on which to answer this question, I'd love to know them. There is one photo in existence of my great-grandfather. That makes it the most interesting photo of him by default. There are hundreds of photos of my son. Which one(s) should be preserved so my great-grandchildren in 2123 can still see them?
- Podgajski 3y ago
  Several people, for example, have 5 to 20 photos of their son or family at the same outing. It’s those redundant photograph I’m talking about mostly. I would say, keep the photos with the most context, look in the backgrounds of photos for items, and things that are interesting, not just the main subject. A photo of a person standing in a field would be much different than a person in a photo sitting inside of a house That they own. And you are right, I think the rarity of the photos is what makes them more beautiful, more valuable.

robertlacok 3y ago

There's an important thing that is easy to miss if you just use a Google Takeout for the export – your Shared albums will only contain pictures that you yourself added! I went through this journey a few months ago, and it's pretty hard to catch because those albums will appear in the export, and they are not empty, so you don't expect that they are partial exports. The way to export them was going one by one in the regular Google Photos app, and downloading each album as a ZIP – that way you get pictures also from other contributors to that album. Funnily enough, I also experienced some rate limiting and had to wait a few minutes after every 6-7 albums. My end goal was importing the Takeout into Apple Photos library locally stored on my Mac. Some other steps I had to take were: - Fixing the metadata [0] so they showed up with a correct date - Importing albums first, and the "Stream" (a folder per year) second, because otherwise the deduplication would mean the pictures already in the stream wouldn't get added to an album. [0] https://metadatafixer.com/ https://metadatafixer.com/

albertzeyer 3y ago
In a Google Photos shared photo album, there is the button to "save photos [to your library]". I would expect that you need to click that in order to have those pictures being contained in your Google Takeout and your library. Did you do that?
- mholt 3y ago
  Correct, if you "Save" shared photos to your account then they start using your storage quota and you can download them in Takeout.
kevincox 3y ago
> going one by one in the regular Google Photos app, and downloading each album as a ZIP But be careful here. Some files will only be available at reduced quality and have all metadata stripped (even if the owner has elected to share it and it is visible in the web UI). The only way to get the original seems to be to contact the original uploader.

koonsolo 3y ago

Does google takeout work properly for any of you? Maybe I just have too many files on there, but I can't get Takeout to properly export everyting. Not to file, not to Dropbox.

jimmydddd 3y ago
Did you find a work around? I have 15 years of family photos on Google. I've had zero complaints but I've always wanted to do a backup in case I ever get locked out of my account like you read about.

darkwater 3y ago

Well well well, for me Google Takeout experience has been pretty bad so far. A couple of years ago I exported all my photos with Takeout, because I wanted to have them locally in my LAN and back them up in BackBlaze. At the same type I set up SyncThing from my phone to my local disk to store and backup new photos and videos without going through Google Photos. But I did leave the "backup" to GPhotos option turned on. Fast forward this year, my (legacy) Google account on which I had most of the photos/videos is now running out of space, so I first reduced the quality of uploaded photos/videos, then completely disabled the backup (I have another cloud backup anyway with Amazon Photos). And then I wanted to stop Google nag and annoy me 3 times a week with the "you almost have no more space in your account, buy Google One ASAP" thing. First thing, I deleted some old shit/videos/attachments I had in GMail from late '00s when Dropbox wasn't a thing yet, but beside some video you quickly realize that photos back in the day were muuuuch smaller. Then I said, OK, I'm going to set a cutoff date for GPhotos and manually delete by UI all photos before 2013. I selected all of them, and put the in the "recycle bin". Then my inner sysadmin instincts came in and said: "hey, did you check that you have on disk and Backblaze those photos?". And behold! they WERE NOT THERE! I had the Takeout output saved as a whole (it actually comes as a zipped or targz file back in the day) and sure enough it somehow stopped around 2013. So, I went swiftly to restore the photos/videos from the bin and back to their place, and then triggered a new Google Takeout. A few hours after, I got an email saying that... IT FAILED, and that I need to retry it. Ok... so maybe it's because I just restored the photos from the recycle bin, let's wait a few more days just to be sure. After a week or so I tried again and a few hours after, again a failure email. This was like 2 months ago, I will try again now since I wrote already this wall of text, but, is there anybody that experienced the same? Did you find a way to get your Takeout?

pierat 3y ago
> Fast forward this year, my (legacy) Google account on which I had most of the photos/videos is now running out of space, so I first reduced the quality of uploaded photos/videos, then completely disabled the backup (I have another cloud backup anyway with Amazon Photos). And then I wanted to stop Google nag and annoy me 3 times a week with the "you almost have no more space in your account, buy Google One ASAP" thing. You know, when Google came out with Gmail, their top comment was that 'You'd never run out of storage, ever'. That was their advertising reel. And then, on Android, 'back up everything user-content' is turned on. And these days it's to grab as much data as possible, AND to then nag you to death with "your storage is running out". I've got all my emails locally. I'm downloading my images, and what few files in Google docs are already copied. Google is just a corpse being bandied around by advertisers and marketers to be made-believe as real.

teeray 3y ago

> Ctrl+Shift+minus to zoom out on your browser until you can only just see the check mark in the corner of an image Hold shift as you click the first photo Release shift PgDn 20-30 times then find another image, hold shift and click the check mark. They all turn blue down to that point Click the tiny top right bin Click Move to bin This is such an absurd dark pattern to keep you spending more money on Google’s storage.

extr 3y ago

I use a triple strategy of Google Photos (for AI and editing), iCloud (for integration into Apple software), and OneDrive (cheap storage + stores everything as raw files). Occasionally I perform a Google Takeout and keep a hard copy on an external SSD as well. Of the three services, iCloud is by far the most cumbersome and difficult to work with.

greenSunglass 3y ago

On iPhone, I'm using Google Photo as my primary photo backup. Anyone would have a good solution to backup iPhone/iOS files/photos to any cloud (s3, blazer, nas, etc..), NAS, or computer that just work?

extr 3y ago
Use OneDrive. Photo backup works in the most "dumb" possible manner, just by dumping every photo as a file into a big folder. And you can pretty seamlessly use it as file storage in lieu of iCloud. And it's absurdly cheap, you get 1TB (+ more if you're willing to create multiple accounts) with O365, along with Word/Excel.
nullwarp 3y ago
I use photosync to photoprism and it works great I toss my phone on the wireless charger and it auto uploads them. Best part is unlike trapping my photos in Google or Apple they are just files stored on a disk

mceachen 3y ago

Oof, I’m not being hyperbolic when I say I hope no one follows this guide. Google Photos json files include metadata that Google may have been stripped from the original photo or video. Future You will want that metadata. Just use software that knows about those sidecars (like PhotoStructure). Don’t downscale *anything*—the software to downscale (like Google Photos) may delete metadata (like GPS lat/lon and captured-at time) that you’ll be sad is missing later, and whatever seems to be “too many pixels” now will seem just adequate with display technology a decade from now. Videos are enormous compared to still images, but sounds and motion can convey so much of what and how things were happening in that moment, and can be invaluable, depending on the content. New parents: take more video. It depends need to be long: 5-10 seconds is great. Back to TFA: the suggestion to move your photos back to yet another (free?) cloud service? How does this leave you in a better place than before? External HDDs are down to $18/tb (at least in USA, it can be a bit more elsewhere). Unless you’re regularly taking hour-long videos at 4K/60FPS, most avid photographers don’t take more than 1tb/year. My entire 25 year digital collection is < 2TB. *Keep a local backup of your originals*!

photo_ta 3y ago

Suppose that you download (or transfer to Dropbox) all your photos on Google Photos. Now you want to delete them from the Google service. How are you supposed to do this? To delete photos in the web app, you have to literally click on each individual one to select it. There appears to be literally no way to mass select all your photos to remove them from Google Photos. The Google answer to thousands of people apparently asking how to do this is "you can use the storage management tools to remove some types of files". That is the Google wizard which helps you remove large files, blurry photos, etc.