> 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.
AFAIK The only way to get the photos with all metadata intact is to use Google Takeout.
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 :)
Run nightly
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.
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.
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.
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.