Looking for a quick and easy way to download all your images and videos from Google Photos? Maybe you want to back up locally or want to create a personal movie and need all content to be saved locally for editing purposes?
Anyway, there is an easy way to download all of your content from Google Photos. Note that I previously talked about how you can also download photos and videos from Facebook
It’s worth noting that if you just need to download a couple of albums, it’s easier to do it manually. Click the album, and then click the three vertical dots in the upper right corner. You will see an option “Download All”.
This will download all the photos and videos in this album in ZIP format. The only problem with this method is that you cannot use it to download photos and videos downloaded from the Google Photos app to your phone or tablet.
To download all of these images and videos, you need to use the method I will discuss below, which is Google Takeout.
Export Google Photos data
There are two ways to get into the Google Archiver. The easiest way is to follow the link below:
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
The harder way is to go to Google.com and then click your profile picture in the upper right corner.
Click on “My Account” and you will be taken to a sort of dashboard for all the settings associated with your Google account.
Under the heading “Personal Information and Privacy” click “Content Management”.
You will see the Upload Data field and the Create Archive link.
The next screen will be the same as if you followed the link above. Here you can choose which data to include in your archive. All is selected by default. Go ahead and click the No button, and then click the radio button next to Google Photos.
You can click the down arrow and select Select Photo Albums if you want to select individual albums. Note that if you’ve downloaded a lot of pictures and videos from your phone, Google Photos will automatically create albums named by date.
In my case, I only created about 450 albums myself, but I have over 2500 albums of them in Google Photos due to the camera upload function on my smartphone. Leave it on “Include all photo albums” if you want to download all. Scroll down and click Next.
On the next screen, you need to select the format you want to use for the archive. If you are using ZIP, anything over 2GB will be split into multiple ZIP files. It’s a little annoying if hundreds of GBs of data are stored in the cloud. In my case, I have 550 GB of photos and videos, so I certainly don’t want to click on 225 download links. I tried it once and it hurts.
Fortunately, you can choose other formats like TGZ and TBZ. You won’t be able to open it in Windows, but you can download a free program like 7-Zip to open archives. It should be noted that using the ZIP method will be much faster as it only needs to create 2 GB files, which can be done quickly.
If you choose any of the other formats, the limit for a single file reaches 50GB. In my case, this is only 11 links, not 225, which is much more convenient. It takes longer for a TGZ or TBZ archive to complete, but you’re only talking about a few hours here and there.
By default, you will receive an email with a link to download the files after creating the archive. Optionally, you can also directly save the archive to Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, which is nice.
Click the Create Archive button and the process will begin. You can close your web browser and the process will continue in the background. You can always go back to Google Archive and then click Manage Archives to view the progress.
Overall, Google has made it easy to load whatever data you’ve stored on your services – a feature that many other companies don’t have. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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