Google Photos has been one among the simplest photo services for years because of its free, unlimited storage. That’s ending in June of 2021, though. If you would like to modify from Google Photos to a different service, here’s the way to export your library of images and videos.
Starting in June of next year, every new photo or video you copy to Google Photos will start counting towards a storage cap. That won’t apply to any of the “High Quality” photos you’ve protected over the past five years, but it means , eventually, you’ll got to buy storage. Google has affordable plans for that, except for some people, charging any price is enough to start out checking out alternatives.
Admittedly, there are some decent options out there, too! For iPhone users, Apple’s iCloud Drive just got tons more attractive because it supports many of an equivalent features as Google Photos, but with better integration with iOS and macOS. Pricing for storage is analogous also .
Visit Google Takeout: The first thing you’ll need to do to collect your pictures and videos out of Google Photos is to access the company’s “Takeout” service. Google Takeout offers the ability to pull all of your data from almost any Google product quickly and easily, and it’s by far the most effective way to download your Google Photos library. You can access Google Takeout at takeout.google.com as long as you’re signed in to your account.
Export your Google Photos library: Once you’ve accessed Takeout, you’ll need to press “Deselect all.” Next, scroll down the page, and you should see Google Photos as an option. Select the checkbox next to Google Photos and proceed to the next step.
Choose how to receive your Google Photos: The exported files of their Google Photos library will not be small by any means whatsoever. Luckily, there are plenty of options. You can have a download link sent to your email with .zip or .tgz files between 1GB and 50GB in size. Alternatively, you can have your files added directly to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box.
Wait for finish: Once you’ve successfully started a Google Takeout export of your Photos library, it’ll take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for Google to fully get all of that data together depending on how much there is to download. In the example image below, I used just one album of a few dozen images. Once the download is ready, Google will email you, and the data will be available to download from Takeout.
