Hacker News Reader

Comment by msh | Hacker News Reader

Then we are only missing google providing the same service!

(I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)

Takeout is NOT great, at least in my case. I never once managed to fully download my photo archive, despite my repeated attempts. I gave up, so my current "strategy" for keeping my photos safe is "Never ever do anything that might make Google algorithms think that I'm violating their ToS".

Yup, when I do my quarterly "Takeout everything" I always separate the photos request out because it takes 3-4 attempts to get it to work. Every single other service? Almost always works first time, even when they're all combined. Photos is the problem child.

I recently moved photos from google photos to icloud using google takeout and it removed meta data from the vast majority of my photos.

Photos with correct dates and locations in google photos not longer have any of that data in icloud. Makes icloud photos a lot less usable, not sure if anyone else has had this issue (can't find any articles on it)

Anyways agree that google takeout needs improvement.

They will usually attach metadata in JSON files accompanying the downloads if it's not attached to the photos, in my experience.

Yup. For those of us with slow WiFi, Google Takeout is basically unusable.

If you really want to get those files, you could try using a VM on a fast network (not sure which cloud offering would be best for this in terms of bandwidth cost).

This is not ideal at all, just suggesting a trick I've used in the past as a workaround for big downloads on an unreliable network. Obviously Google should just improve their service.

FWIW, you can do a takeout to another service like OneDrive or another Google Drive account and use their clients to sync. You can probably use wget to download in a more stable way, too.

I've had the same experience. The worst part is that you can only retry a download of a Google Takeout archive so many times before it locks you out, and you have to wait a day or so for a new takeout...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com