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Comment by dmytton | Hacker News Reader

Moving large numbers of files - like the 50k of Google Photos the author mentions - can be done using https://rclone.org. Set up Google Photos as a source and then use the copy command to move it to a different location[1]. There are a lot of different commands which work with many different cloud storage systems e.g. sync everything one way locally to a backup, mount a FUSE filesystem, do two-way sync, etc.

[1] https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/

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Beware that using rclone with google photos may result in lower quality images and missing metadata. Below is taken from the rclone website:

Limitations

Downloading Images

When Images are downloaded this strips EXIF location (according to the docs and my tests). This is a limitation of the Google Photos API and is covered by bug #112096115.

The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort Downloading Videos

When videos are downloaded they are downloaded in a really compressed version of the video compared to downloading it via the Google Photos web interface. This is covered by bug #113672044.

Source: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

If you want to save Google Photos, use Google Takeout to download it. It allowed you to download all of your google-related-data, including photos.

As others have said Google Photos backup via RClone has some caveats, mainly not downloading at original quality. Google Takeout does solve this but but in weird hierarchies.

I stumbled on a new project which simulates a browser download using a headless Chrome Developer tools session[0]. Looks interesting, supports continuation and can be ran on a cron job. Worth a look.

[0] https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp

Also, see Jake Wharton's Docker GPhotos Sync [0] for a containerized version of this tool. Unfortunately, this method seems to be the easiest way to automate a backup at full quality.

[0] https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync

> Google Takeout does solve this but but in weird hierarchies.

Surprisingly, the Takeout split archives can contain partial contents for a given folder or album. If you extract everything into a single merged root, you'll see both the sidecars and images in the same directory.

If you're on macOS or Linux, you can do this by mounting the tarballs with ratarmount and skip the extraction step. Details and links here: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/archive-file-format-compr...

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