Beginning June 1, 2021, any new images and videos you save to Google Photos will be deducted from your 15GB of free storage. If you don’t take a lot of photos, this might not be a problem. And if you have a Pixel phone, your photos still don’t count against your total storage. (Note, however, that these photos will be “high-quality” compressed images from Google, not originals.) But be prepared to have to pay for Google One storage if you like to take lots of photos.
You may decide to shrug and buy a subscription: Google One isn’t that expensive, and compares quite well with other photo services. However, if you decide you want to move your photos to a different service or just save them to your computer drive or other local storage, you’ll need to export them from Google Photos first. Here’s how.
Google Takeout
The first thing to note is that you can’t just go into Google Photos and download your stuff. You have to use Google’s export tool.
- go Google Takeout. (You can go to the same page while in Google Photos by selecting Settings, scrolling down to “Export your data” and clicking “Backup”.)
- You will find a long list of your Google apps; All will be checked in advance. If you want to use this opportunity to download all your Google data, check it out; otherwise, find and click the “Deselect all” link at the top of the checkboxes.
- Scroll down to “Google Photos”
- If you want to know in which formats your data will be exported, click the button that says “Multiple formats”. Basically, your photos are exported in the format they were imported (PNG, JPG, WEBP), videos are exported in MP4 format, and your metadata is exported in JSON text format.
- You can also choose not to export all of your albums. The second button under “Google Photos” will probably say “Including all photo albums”. If you only want to export some of your albums, click this and then uncheck the albums you don’t want to export.
- Scroll down and click “Next step”
- You can now choose from a variety of different options: whether you want your data to be sent to you as attachments via email or to Drive, OneNote, Dropbox or Box; how often do you want your data to be exported (this is every one or two months during a year); type of file to download (a ZIP or TGZ compressed file); and how large you want the exported files to be. For example, if your exported file will be larger than 2GB, you can have it split into multiple files. I have about 39 GB of photos, resulting in 19 compressed files. You can request files up to 50GB, but Google states that compressed files over 2GB will be delivered. Zip64 format.
- Click “Create export”
And that’s it. Google will warn you that it may take hours or even days for your data to become available; I have several thousand photos and it only took a little over half an hour for the link to my export to appear in my email. Of course, it may take much longer than that to download them all, depending on your internet connection.
