Fantastic info - OMG I'm glad I did a search before a threw myself at Google Takeout. One question though. You say that the maximum number in a single album is 500. I have albums, and can create albums, with many more. I did a search and it seems like the max is 20.000 ... changed from 10.000 in 2018.
@@marblejarchannel I just tested it right now and I'm also able to download more than 500 images. I've setup my albums just like your quarterly system from the video, and because of vacations some have been well over 800 but have downloaded with no issue.
I currently have between 88,000-97,000 photos in My Google Photos starting way back in 2004. I’m just wondering why Google won’t allow an option to just drag and drop EVERY photo onto a USB Flash Drive and or External Hard Drive.
As of today (August 2021), it seems like we no longer have the 500 items per album rule. I have succesfully downloaded an album with 2000+ items. FYI all.
I literally spent hours and days doing the Takeout method, what garbage! Excellent recap here, will definitely be using this method. THANK YOU FOR SHARING
6 minutes of video of straightforward, eloquent, concise explanation that are going to save me countless hours of tidying up photos. I love the Internet.
Great !!! ONE THING you missed. Google can accidentally (and it has happened) DELETE your whole account. GONE... pictures videos youttube videos everything gone forever. Oh there was a complaint about animal abuse and we deleted your account.
Great video, Google really has dropped the ball on Takeout. Just for anyone who hasn't setup their Albums yet, in Photos if you search for 2021 Q1 it will return photos within that time period. Helpful for organising :)
Without being alarmist, I have had 2 western digital and 1 Toshiba backup drives (1tb each) crash and die (unrecoverable ) over the past 3 years. I have had a 250GB HDD since 2005 - still works well. I don’t trust them - i backup to 2 hard drives and Dropbox (no particular reason). Your 1 hard drive model is too risky for me 🙈. I love your videos 👍👍
Still a complete PITA when you have a zillion unstructured photos and not organized like you did. Thank you for this alternative...it is STILL better than just plain takeout.... one wonders if G doesn’t WANT you to export (grin)....
Ooook, I started Takeout download last night. NEED that metadata!!! Thank you for saving me time and heartache. I will begin setting up my photos into Quarters. I will do better going forward. By far one of the best videos I have watched on RU-vid.
What a blessing you are for recording what you learned the hard way!!! Your tutorial is an excellent example of how everyone should do a tutorial. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!
Forgot to.say that if you are an Amazon prime member you get unlimited original quality picture backup and 5Gb video backup so set your external drive to sync to Amazon afterwards
Google Takeout is a disaster. I ended up creating albums like you recommended and then I also downloaded those by each day. It takes enormous amount of time to download everything, but it could be achieved.
I really see where you're coming from using this method. It really is a good one. However, for me, having over 500k photos backed up to google photos, with a size of about 1.9TB, this method simply isn't feasible, since I'd take years to add 500 photos to one album to download them (I'd literally have to make 1000 albums for this). Wish google would make something easier....
Excellent tip! I tried google takeout and ended up with 20 separate 50gb files with no metadata and random organization. Other methods suggested on the web to reorganize them requires python scripts and just makes things a lot more complex. This is quick and easy to understand.
Thanks! This was super helpful. It's super annoying that Google once had an efficient system for storing photos on Google Drive but took that option away about a year ago. All I want to do is find where my photos are stored on Google Drive but they're nowhere to be found. They once had something that worked and changed it to something that doesn't. It's a shame we have to do it like this now but thank you, nonetheless.
I love this method. I have been trying to consolidate my photos but google was making me mad with how hard it was to get the photos off! So glad I found your method. Thanks
This video really helped , I tried Takeout what a joke, personally I had to play another You Video on how to unzip the files which lacking in the video, otherwise great.
Almost 2 years later and this is still applicable. Too bad I had already done the Takeout thing; however, I deleted all that and and am using your method which is still much faster. Thanks you.
Wow, this is a huge help! I just used Takeout and was so irritated how they came over and what's this JSON... Ugh... thank you for this! I'm hoping just this now. I'm also subscribing for any additional content. Thanks again & cheeres doll!
While it is very unlikely that your house will be destroyed and Google will stop providing you with storage, there is one fairly simple thing you can do to even save yourself from that eventuality - just have another external disk drive with a copy of your photos that is updated routinely and stored elsewhere. BTW, you should consider also backing up documents and other important files the same way. One piece of software I use is Beyond Compare. It allows me to only copy the new files during backup. (P.S. I once had 2 disk drives go belly up at the same time, but fortunately I had a 3rd one that did not.)
Thank you for your insights and suggestions. I have 400GB of photos and videos and close to 100K photos in Google. Those are sorted by each activity, which basically means I have several hundred albums. The thing is, even if I download all my albums, there will be photos that won't get downloaded because the albums are just the highlighted photos. I am torn between using your method and losing all my albums, or just download each of my albums and disregard those not already in the albums. Sigh.. But thank you for the info about EXIF data NOT in the takeout.
Hi, there. In your case, I might create chronological albums solely for the purpose of downloading (and leave your activity based ones, of course). You can even delete them after you finish since (theoretically) you won’t be adding new photos to those past album. That way they won’t clutter up your album page. Just a thought - good luck and thanks for the comments!
I have 400.000 photos in my Google Photos. No way, I'll create redundant albums just for the download :D But for small collections, this seems to be a nice option. BTW, there are tools, that revert the modified date back to the original from the EXIF data.
Laura, thank you for explaining your method in layman's terms. You explained a complex subject in a manner that anyone should be able to understand and use. Thank you for taking the time to make this video.
The video is really amazing..but i am facing a problem..while downloading some albums are having their original date and time..but some are not having it in file info option.. can anyone tell a solution for this problem please
Great advice, unfortunately now my photos are in albums, backed up in extract files on my external hard drive and I cannot pull them up to print them. Thoughts?
Spent days on google takeout only to realize what a complete mess it is. Your video and the pinned comment has given me a pinch of something i call hope.
I am still having a problem finding the right created date. When I download the pictures the modified and created date are the same. This has been super frustrating because I want to be able to see the date that the picture was taken. Do you have any experience with this and how to fix it. Do I have a setting wrong?
Hi Laura! You are probably aware by now but if not you can right click on your transferred stored photos, select Sort, go down to More, and from there click on Date Taken. That will enable you to see your photos chronologically. Great video!
Great video. However, it seems the one thing that doesn't export are the captions/descriptions you've added in Google Photos. Anyone know how to do that?
I extracted takeout file with WINRAR. It was a backup of my Google drive that had photos and videos. It worked superfine for me. Gave me back my photos and videos just like how I originally organized them.
after going half way through the takeout madness googled to find some alternate ways !! for a company taking pride in UI and UX, wonder why their export tool sucks this bad !!
I tried the same thing...ran in to the same problem. Have to start over, and this validates the plan I was going to do. I'm also going to have extra albums, for vacations, Christmas, and the like. Thanks for posting!
Thanks! I am right there realizing that for the future I will be managing photos like Taxes....It will be yearly. But for this year I have to deal with 5 years. And I was trying to to do takeout and that is tricky.
Awesome! I tried Takeout and it is a mess. Google lost about six months of my images so I am downloading the many thousands I have with them and will toss their services. Thanks for this excellent idea.
Thanks a lot.. At first when I heard you I thought yours is a long & complicated process. So I continue working on Google Take Out, like increasing Zip limit from 2gb to 50gb or decreasing to 1gb or directly transfeing to Google Drive(😂actually I got these ideas from some great man's comments on this video) Believe me, nothing happened except wastage of my Data(money)& Time. Lastly I hear you patiently. I can't believe what a EASY process it is ‼️‼️
This was extremely helpful thank you! So much easier than trying to deal with Google Takeout. Took me a bit of time but in the end now that I'm caught up to the present it'll be easy to maintain.
I just ended up setting the download size to 10gb so there wouldn't be so many zip files. Ended up being 6 zips- 58gb of photos with takeout. Used search to delete all the .json files and moved all the yearly folders (about 2000 folders) into year folders if they were wrong and uploaded/saved as I went. Used search for jpg/heic etc to group. Probably would have been easier to do it your way from the start (I might do it your way again for better organization)- takeout is a mess but it does have the benefit of having all versions of your original photos as well as finished product if you do a lot of editing. Anyway, a good time to do this since Google is ending free Photos uploading in June. Switching services and adding redundancy as well as making copies into multiple hard drives for safe keeping. Thanks!
Just note that this works better if you use original quality. If the photos are compressed (the setting most users will have) they wont get exactly the originals to backup
Using this way of downloading did you find that the photographs are down sampled? Please let me know how to keep the size of the original file when downloading. Thanks
Just scrolled through the comments to find out if anybody else came across this problem or if it's just me. Apparently, this is really a problem. Per Take out, I get the original size and quality, while the album downloads are down sampled. Thus, alas, this method doesn't work for me either.
Great video this was super helpful. As a techie geek I just wanted to warn everyone yo definitely definitely make at least one backup of your external drive and test it yearly at least as spinning hard drives (especially external non-emterprise write class drives go bad or have corrup sectors often. A corrupt hard drive is your worst nightmare. There are exyernal drive covers which will make a mirror image of your first drive for about 20 bucks and free of course if you do it yourself
I'm looking to do this the other way round, in that I've just signed up for Google photos, I have all my files saved to my pc, and I'm trying to see where Google photos is up to with uploading all my photos and videos in percentage terms, not sure why they make this so hard! It's infuriating! Any advice gratefully received ❤
Any suggestions on a workflow to download a dozen years of Google Photos (over 50GB) and retiring the files in a usable format? I want to retain all of the metadata too (original dates etc).
uhhh.. THANK YOU! so much! I think it's a great idea that you organize the albums by quarter and use a spreadsheet! These tips are seriously helpful thank you for this!
skip forward to 2024...what a bloody mess! icloud syncs maybe 75% of the t8me..so i go with Gone as cloud bkup..now i want my devices to sync to a photo app (not apple but G) but G changed the rules, now Gfotos count as storage, so x # of fotos is doubled! so i created folders, tada, & i bkuped up everything to a drive..end game is i want what i want! fotos on fone but not synced, manually do that, bkup to cloud (G) not icloud, keep all my fotos somewhere, which is now Gone..it's a hot mess, if icloud wld just bloody work!
I am 64, I am so immensely grateful to you for this, as I have been wrestling with this for almost 2 years, one photo at a time off and on. This is Clear, Concise, and it Works, YaY! Thank you!!!
Thanks for the video. I wish you would have talked about the original resolution of the photos. I am having a hard time using your second method and not able to download the original 12.2MB photo, instead I get the compress version stored in google photos (2.2MB) and not the original 12.2MB.
I used takeout and I was so confused with all those .json files. Plus all my photos were without date of creation. It was a mess! Thank God I didn't delete them from Google Photos. Your video literally saved me. Thank you so much!
My free version of google drive is 15gb max. So to keep it below that level I go to google drive pictures...scroll down to the oldest pictures...and, one month at a time, I select all the pictures by checking each day. I download that month and copy onto a separate drive. Yes, it's somewhat slow. But it gives me confidence that it is actually working. I label the monthly files "2019 August media". Then I go back and DELETE that month of pictures on my google drive. That frees up around 200mb or so on my google drive. Now my hard drive becomes the only "home" for the pictures. Naturally THAT MUST ALSO be backed up on another separate drive in order to avoid disaster. 100 years ago my grandmother would throw negatives in a box and that was it. So who is to say which is better?
Where is the zip file sent? My Google photos email address is my Yahoo address. That's the ONLY way I can log into Google photos. When I got my new phone, a could see on my old phone that a pdf file had been sent, presumably to some mysterious Gmail, and I am unable to log into the Gmail I believe was the one used to set up my phone. I've tried every Gmail I have. Is there a way to get that zip file sent to my Yahoo instead? When the guy set up my Halo, then I tried an iPhone, then changed my mind because I liked the Halo better, he even had to send a code to my Yahoo to get me into my account to make the swaps. I'm not sure what he did? Help.
Wat a timing 😭 I jus started the Take Out today mrng and its evening now and Google is still processing the initiation Edit: I cancelled the takeout that got initiated and i did exactly the way you quartered it yrly.. And can you guess how much GB of Photos and Vids that i got.. Exactly 144GB of data and these are From 2015 till dec 2020... Thanks a Ton 🔥🔥
I downloaded my album just like you described on my windows computer and I attempt to open and instead of showing JPG Files for my images, it's all in HEIC. How can I make them all JPG? Thank you.
Thanks so much. As I had already been using download of the zip file that I found long and tedious, so I started looking at the takeout road but it didn't work initially. Luckily, I came across your video before going any further on takeout. The modification of the files data and format is senseless so no way I'm going that way. So back to downloading zips. I would like to offer some extra info about this process. First, you mention that zipped downloads only show the modified date (true), but if you unzip the files, explorer will show the original date and time of creation. Second, since I unzip my files, I found that downloading the zips to my local HD and then unzipping the files to my network drive faster than dowloading them directly to the network drive - mind you this could be limited by the speed of my network (wired).
How to make an album once you run out of storage ? Im kind of stuck ever since i ran outnof storage , neither am i able to restore nor able to make albums due to the same pls help
Just now I finished dowloaded all my photos using takeout with the total size of 296GB, got 6 zip files, 50GB each, and now I am regret because of the .json file extension. Will follow your method now. haha
I wish I knew about the mess that google takeout was going to cause. I eventually ended up getting metadata fixer which is an $25 app that takes your google takeout zip files and merges the photo with the .json file. It took about 40 hours to go thru 40k files (1.2TB) of data. In the end it worked out, but I couldn't do the album export that way cause I just had too many photos.
for fucks sake i only got here AFTER wasting soooo much time on the takeout crap! I was trying to help my wife move all her photos from her unmarried name to married we have been slacking on unification for years LOL so we finally started doing this and see all these folders and .json files like are you fucking kidding me?? Then i thought the album thing would be good but figured i better search first and here is your video saving me from myself LOL. Thank you !
I use a similar method, too. Sadly I hand to find out, the preserved Date in the Metadata DOES NOT seem to work with Raw files. That's really a bummer! :o
You don't have to have a house fire to have trouble. External drives DIE! But fortunately they're SO cheap now that having a few isn't an issue. I'd have an A and B drive at least, and keep one offsite at local family or friends that you visit at least each quarter, and swap them out for the update.
Awesome tip! Thank you so much for sharing it with us! I have been conteplating how to backup my photos and videos, and I think Google made it hard on purpuse! Before google had the Google drive app that synced the photos automatically but it stopped that service. Google wants all the users hooked up i side its box
I think this process works for those with a manageable number of photos, however I have 2TB and not practical. If you change the archive size to the biggest available, 50GB and select Google Drive as the destination you dont get the issue with the seperate metadata, the files appear in your google drive and you simply use google drive sync to sync to your home HDD. It will take a few days but it is by far the easiest process and worked well for me
I would like some clarity on your comment please. First, I assume you are referring to the archive setting in Takeout, correct? Second, using your method of moving pics first to Drive prior to downloading to a local drive, does Takeout MOVE the pics from photos to Drive, or does it COPY the photos to Drive? The reason for that second question is that if Takeout COPIES the pics to Drive, vs MOVING the pics to drive, then I would need at least as much free space as the photos I'm moving because Google would basically be DOUBLING my needed storage to FACILITATE the transfer. Example: I have 30 GB of photos but only 10 GB of the 100 GB storage available in Drive. So in this example I would need a minimum of 120 GB of total storage (with a minimum of 30 GB still open in Drive) (this is just a mathematical example as I do understand that Google doesn't offer a 20 GB storage space upsell) else I would hit my 100 GB limit (or obviously delete a minimum of 20 GB from my current Drive account, which of course I don't want to do.) I would like your input on this before I start this potentially onerous process. Thanx in advance.
You can choose how big the files from Takeout will be, I got 39 2GB-files but it could have been 20 4GB files. It took me 10-15 minutes per file and I could download 4-5 at the time no problem. That it failed for you says more about your ISP and Router than it does about Google. The Takeout version actually does both of what you say. All the EXIF-data (where it was taken, when, what camera, etc) is all stored in each JPEG so no need to do this round-about way of doing it. Windows Photo app is perfectly capable of reading this informatiuon. The metadata.json file contains text you've written into the Album itself on Google What I haven't been able to figure out is how to get Google Takeout to actually include ALL the images. Right now it only Downloads images that are in an Album...
Question please I have memories of photos and videos on an old device, so I backed them up using Google Photos, and I made a factory reset for the old device and left it, and I registered my account on the new device and Google Photos, but after I registered my account on the new device, these photos can I see them in the internal storage of my device, or are they in the account In-app only Do you mean that it is only stored in the company's servers??
I tried this method and it worked well with all my photos, but not with the videos. Even if I included both photos and videos in my albums, when I downloaded the albums to my laptop I realised the videos were not there. Why??
I'd recomend a NAS to keep your photos on. It gets a little pricy, but it comes down how valuable your time is. If that one external drive failes, you'll be doing all that over again. If you don't want to get a NAS, a second backup drive will certainly be better than the single drive. There are lots of ways to do it, but NAS will be the safe investment.
I'm in the process of downloading all the my google Photos to my MacBook and apple photos - but I can seem to figure out how location info that was in google photos can be displayed in apple photos. does anyone have any experience with that?
Wow, I downloaded by photos using the Takeout method sometime ago, but I never opened the zip files.... I also assumed everything would be properly organized! Now the paranoid in me is (again) afraid that Google will die someday haha.
This is tedious. While I was surprised that some albums that were existent before in the zip are now gone (even the album meta data is missing in the zip's json) but exists in the cloud. Sigh.
The issue killing me is I took the bait and upgraded my Google storage, so naturally I wanted to overwrite all my past compressed photos with their full-quality originals - but Google doesn't LET you do that through its Drive software!! I would have to delete everything and re-upload at original quality BUT that's a big problem too because the photos include everything backed up from our many iPhones over the years too, with no way to segregate those out. It's terrible, and I wish I could say I was leaving this comment AFTER solving it but wheels are still spinning.
What platform are you opening the photo with in order to see the meta data? I'm on Mac and can't find the meta data after downloading the photos like you described...
After extracting the zip file not all photos are there...eg I have 400 photos in my album after following the procedure I cn only see 250 photos in my laptop... Could u pls help???
