I tried to build a product to help people get a physical backup out of Google Photos but their API had so many rate limits and random other errors it would take _days_ or more: https://www.clonecamel.com
Now, I need to also look at how this will work with my personal backup system that uses rclone to an encrypted USB drive.
Also, the fact that they don't mention this difference- the UI is so poorly done that you can only tell that TGZ can go an order of magnitude larger after selecting it in one drop-down and then looking at the other drop down- is a sign of how Google wants to make this as difficult as possible.
It’s annoying in that it can take up to a week for the first mail to reply. And you can’t automate it, so no automatic backups.
But these limits are weird because while file size limits do exist, they don't match Google's limits: 4GB is the limit for regular zip, zip64 has a limit of 16 exabytes. And TGZ's limit of 50GB shows that they they have the internal infrastructure to support building larger files too.
So, other than that most of their customers use Windows and they want to make takeout as annoying as possible, do they put that limit on it?
The frequent failures to generate my takeout are annoying though.