How to Move Your Google Photos | Hacker News Reader

How to Move Your Google Photos

auckland.ac.nz

136 pointsLeftium94 comments

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/

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?

Correct, if you "Save" shared photos to your account then they start using your storage quota and you can download them in Takeout.

> 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.

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.

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

> 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...

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?

> 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.

I also have the issue that Google Takeout just flat out fails every time I try it.

I tried getting support for it via my paid Google One subscription but I just got bounced around different teams and nobody knew what to do. Ultimately they just said it can’t be fixed.

For me, it was the last straw. I bought an iPhone and I’m degoogling now. I guess to get my data out I might need to submit an GDPR data portability request, if I can find where to submit it.

The Data Protection Officer is a formally defined role within the GDPR. Search for that term + company, and you should find an address. Generally dpo@company.com, or similar.

The Data Accessibility modalities need to be defined in the Data Processing Agreement. So "dpa" or "data processing agreement" are also good search terms.

FWIW Apple Photos is even worse. There is no mass export mechanism for Apple Photos, and it won't let you sync an album on MacOS to an external drive. I had to make a MacOS VM on my server and attach a large internal drive. Then, after syncing my 900 GB of media, I connected the drive to a Linux VM and extracted the media from the Photos library.

Update on this: this time the Takeout worked, even if I had to use Chromium to download because on Firefox I was getting a strange HTTP 400 after clicking the button.

I still have many older albums with a lot of IMG_NNNN.JPG.json with all the metadata but NOT the actual picture. Weird. I'm pretty sure those are not albums with other contributors.

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.

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.

> (...) 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?

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.

I find this incredibly hard to do. Mainly because what I have found interesting in my parents collection of media probably would have been thrown out. I found one of the more interesting videos to be of my grandfather just recording a random dinner with my parents mid week. He was an avid tech fan and always needed the newest equipment. To test this one out he setup a tripod and just recorded.

They chatted about the weather, family, news and they made several jokes, told stories about family, and it was just this fly on the wall moment for me watching a taste of what that relationship was like. This little slice of life moment really stuck with me and I made it a point to take similar recordings on my own.

Weddings are great, but they are a performance. It is an abstraction from who people are. I enjoy a more candid style which I feel like gets tossed a lot more these days in pursuit of what we consider perfection. Storage is cheap so I keep almost everything.

What your parents kept in the past was related to how difficulty it was to take in store the media. The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory.

Surely not every moment in your life can be as significant as that moment that your family was around the table talking about the news and the weather.

The best photo presentations I did for clients was when there were fewer photographs presented, not more.

> The ease of which we can take and store and save our images is making those memories cheaper and therefore less valuable. Photographs should trigger a memory, photographs shouldn’t be the memory.

I don't think this is true. Otherwise we wouldn't treasure photos of our great grandparents, or even of ourselves when we were babies.

the relationship between you and the photo will change if you took it, a friend/family member took it but you were there, or an ancestor took it. I disagree with the parent that there's one purpose for photos, but I agree with them that less can be more. Curating your photos improves signal-to-noise and makes them more likely to have an emotional impact on you, family, or someone discovering them after you've passed.

Photo curation is a quite different thing from photo archival.

Treating the two as the same problem makes things much harder, at least for me: If I know that every decision to not pick a given photo means that it’ll be permanently deleted, I end up with much larger albums than is probably reasonable for sharing with friends and family.

Storage is cheap, time spent worrying is expensive. I like being able to revisit my presentation/curation choices at a later point in time, e.g. when my audience, medium (portrait vs. landscape!), or aesthetic criteria have changed.

> go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now.

This is how you lose historical records, because the critical eye of the day is going to be very different in 50 years.

have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM , which is a video of the British Library's archive. They collect published material, no matter how mundane it might seem to be, because only someone from the future looking back can tell whether it was worth preserving.

Digital data is trivial to preserve compared to physical materials! Don't delete the digital photos!

I don’t believe we could ever capture enough photographic and visual data to perfectly re-create the past.

So where do you personally stop? That’s the question I was asking. It’s sort of a future fear of missing out your suffering from.

To offer a counterpoint:

https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

Around the 3:30 mark, while discussing Notre Dame Cathedral, consider how useful all those photos (and however many taken since) would be in its post-fire reconstruction.

Would anyone present at that demo in 2007 think there were too many photos, especially if they knew it would burn down?

When I read that I just thought I should just delete everything then.

Ha! I’m curious, why is that?

I’m curious because in the mid 90s, I burned all my black-and-white film negatives in a rage of creativity. I felt like all my old work was dead and I was just relying on that and not creating anything new. I look back at that moment with both her and liberation so it’s hard to say whether it was good or bad.

I had a minor fascination with "life in the 70s" in Ireland. I wanted to know what sort of life I could have if I was sitting catipulted back in time 50 years. What would I eat? How often would I wash? What job would I do? What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet). If I went to my local grocery, what could I get?

You'd think that this should be easy to answer but it really isn't. For example, you might think that you could just search for music created prior to 1975 and that's the list of music I'd listen to. But it isn't. I can remember how insanely hard it was to get a copy of something, even in the 90s. I wanted a track by Nirvana called D7. At the time I was searching for it, it hasn't been released. I heard it on an obscure pirate radio station. I eventually found it while visiting London, inside a huge HMV store, in the ridiculously expensive imports section. The single was more expensive than two regular albums. So the actual list of music that you might reasonably hear, or hear of, and then to be able to get... It's pretty tiny.

Similarly, you might be able to get your hands on mangos, chilis and spices, but not in my old town. You'd be lucky to find peppers.

I found a jigsaw puzzle, "brands from the 70s", which has all the most popular supermarket brands you'd find in the UK & Ireland. My mother spent 10 minutes looking at the photo on the box, stabbing the various items with her finger, saying "Oooh, I remember when the packaging looked like that! And those sweets! You can't get them any more!" and off she goes, remembering some story from her childhood in the 60s... some old man who used to call into their house for a chat on his way up the road, and would have a bar of Fry's Chocolate Creme to split between 5 kids...

> What would everything smell like (smoke and B.O. I'm willing to bet)

Don't forget car exhaust! The air here is so clean now I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car while driving. It's hard to imagine everything smelling like that all the time.

> I can smell a classic car from several hundred meters away inside my car

It's worth noting that most classic cars are tuned running too rich fuel mixture - because they are driven so rarely, it's more important that the engine runs at all than that the engine is running efficiently.

Those cars smelled different - once the choke was off - wen they where new.

> This is how you lose historical records

I think GP is right. If you look at most people's photo albums, there will be a picture and then five blurry versions of it taken seconds apart from each other. Being a bit selective often means you will be more likely to browse the album again.

I have two shared albums on Google Photos. One is an archive that holds (essentially) every picture of our kids. The other is a curated album of pictures from the first. But I started these albums when our twins were born, and now we've got 3 kids, so there's... ~12,000 in the everything album and ~700 in the curated album. I try to get a couple of pictures in there every week or two, since we don't do social media but want to share pictures with family and friends.

On the other hand with digital cameras and phones we tend to take several photos of the same scene. In that case it would help taking the few seconds to decide on which one is the best and delete the others. We rarely do that.

For the first part I can't do this at the time, but I find that going back over my old photos a few months or even a year later I can easily delete the similar photos and find the most pleasing version.

As for the second, I've become lazy - going to investigate syncthing.

I'm selfhosting Immich (Google photos clone) on my NAS which has a 70TB's+ of storage. Every night a backup to Glacier runs (which is pennies to store, expensive to retrieve). Every so often I hook up an external hdd and just copy the backup over.

I've had some pretty severe data loss a few years back where I had photos on a cloud service that shut down and I was too careless to properly back them up. Once I got kids I stepped it up a notch and vowed to never let that happen again (the Glacier backup is for when my house burns down or something). Still need to write some proper instructions for my family to retrieve the data if I am unable but they're basically files on a hdd.

As for curating them, I'll leave that to the next person. I think I'd have loved to comb through pics my parents took of us. I do select pictures that are super great and add them to an album. Throwing away isn't worth the effort imo.

I've been meaning to set this up. which NAS do you use, and do you like it? how do you sync it with local copies for editing? I shoot 10k raw photos a year and editing with remote storage is too slow, but it gets unwieldy locally.

Not OP but I use an NVME enclosure with a 4 TB drive in it for my main staging area (I have about 100,000 photos from 4 years on it right now.) This offers fast storage for editing. I highly recommend against the Samsung T7 as it would get hot and throttle way too easily.

I try to rsync the drive to my homebuilt NAS any time I add photos. At this point I feel comfortable formatting SD cards.

The NAS is set to backup to Backblaze using restic every night at 3am.

I'd like to add one more backup into the mix, but cloud storage is expensive.

Thanks, that's helpful. I've had a number of NVME enclosures and have thermal issues with most of them. As a one-off hack, it can be helpful to lightly spray with rubbing alcohol if you need to cool one off during a large transfer.

FWIW, the T7 is not an NVME enclosure per se, but rather a "portable hard drive." Its issues are well documented in forums.[0][1][2] I've known a couple friends in real life who've owned it as well, and they ran into the same issues I did.

I'm now using an OWC Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with a 4 TB WD Black SN850X and have no issues whatsoever. Very happy with this solution!

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/q8zvyt/samsung...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/kky9g5/my_sam...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/qp4m1h/white_d...

Do you use encryption and/or compression on the hard drives or cloud? That’s my main concern with disaster recovery - feels so much easier if it’s literally just raw files backed up everywhere instead of needing software.

They are just an rsync clone on my NAS (so raw files), but restic uses encryption and compression when backing up to Backblaze.

There are other approaches, but I appreciate having the dedupe & snapshots, and I encrypt any potentially sensitive files that I send to the cloud.

I went all out and got a Synology DS1621+ with 5 14TB drives. I don't really do photo and/or video editing so I'm not sure what the requirements for that are. I access it through Immich but I've also got a few shares mounted through NFS which is very fast imo.

> 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.

This is so true. It doesn't even need to be with a super critical eye. People take multiple shots of the same subject then keep all of them. IMO if you are keeping all of them then none of them are special so delete them all. If you insist it is special but can't pick then just pick one at random and be done with it.

People are such hoarders when it comes to pictures and it means they never, ever look through them because there are far too many.

> As far as backing up photos, most of you have too many photos.

Photography is a hobby for many people. I don’t think you get to prescribe people how to spend their time (curation takes a lot of it!) and/or money on their own enjoyment as long as it doesn’t harm others.

I have two close friends, both of them quite into amateur photography. One takes about 10 times as many photos as the other and never deletes any of them, the other is quite selective in what they shoot and even more selective in what they keep; their camera roll is their curated gallery.

They sometimes have a very hard time empathizing with the other’s approach, but both seem pretty happy with their choices :)

I was not offering Commandments, just advice.

Johnny Harris has a good video about this: https://youtu.be/GLy4VKeYxD4

Basically it's just going through your old photos every now and then and deleting everything you deem not worthy ("doesn't spark joy").

The one innovation is that your definition of "worthy" will change as time progresses, some photo might be essential to you now, but in a few years you'll go "meh" and delete it.

I'm a similarly semi professional photographer, and I have to agree. Most photos are stored for decades just to never be looked at again. Sure it might be interesting to retrieve a picture of that random piece of furniture or that car one future day, but seriously how many photos of their dog will people retrieve from storage?

I'm taking pictures everywhere. At the supermarket, on the road, in the kitchen, it's more than words. All these photos are super ephemeral, they will literally expire within 30 minutes. I think it is actually correct to store low resolution copies only, as they are just enough to trigger my own memory. I would gain nothing from a RAW copy of that photo. I would lose nothing from deleting them from the archive, but it's a hassle.

My non-professional photo library is at around 50 GByte, excluding astrophotography projects and photogrammetry runs. It's a really handy size for backups, and it indexes quickly with whatever service. I'm using Google Photos as a dumping ground, but PhotoPrism also indexes quickly.

I'll also note that geotags and a correct clock matter much more for archiving than high dynamic range and raw file formats. "Real cameras" suck for easy archiving. I want to zoom into a map of places I've been, and GPS is way too flimsy to be reliable on my Canon gear.

I have too many pictures to sort through now. I've tried multiple times; I don't have enough time to go through them all. The only way I can find anything is by Google Photos' AI labeling and search, or timestamps.

I deleted so much stuff from my old PCs due to disk space constraints at the time, and I wish so badly I had just bought another disk. It would be so great to still have some of that stuff, of not purely for historical record. You don't know what you'll miss 10 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.

Sorry, no, this is signing me up for too much work, never mind all my non-technical family members.

The whole point of cloud photo services is to eliminate the technical challenge of file management.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Honest question (I don't know much about about EXIF), but wouldn't the metadata be peanuts compared to the actual image data?

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

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

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.

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

Don't forget to fix the dates: https://github.com/laurentlbm/google-photos-takeout-date-fix...

> 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.

Apple Photos is almost impossible to get all your photos out of.

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

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*!

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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/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."

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.

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

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-.... It looks like the tool is basically in maintenance mode currently which should mean it works reasonably well - https://github.com/nextcloud/integration_google.

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?

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.

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

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

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?

Good point, thanks.

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 [2] https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/google-photos-...

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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/googlechange...

The motivation isn't explained. That assumption isn't laid out

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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".

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.

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.

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