How to Download Photos from Google Photos
Google photos is a very popular photo management software and many of us have used Google Photos to store our photos at some point. If you would like to take your photos out of Google Photos, there are a few important things to know.
•Pictures will lose their metadata (date taken, ISO, geolocation, other camera information). This data will be located in a .json file that shares the name of the picture file. There are third party tools to fix this.
1.) Prepare Your Library to Export
If you have shared photos that you would like included in the download, be sure to add them to your library first.
2.) Using Google Takeout to Export
Navigate to takeout.google.com and sign in using your Google login
2. Make sure other data and services from Google are not included in the export by choosing “Deselect All”
3. Scroll down to Google Photos and make sure it’s box is checked.
4. Then click on “All photo albums included”. This is where things get a little specific.
•You will see every photo album in your library listed. You will also see “Photos from [year]” for every year. This is where duplicates can be created, as the photos in your customized albums may also appear in the year albums.
•You have a couple options to deal with this:
a.) Uncheck the customized albums since the year albums usually contain all of the photos from each year, whereas the customized albums only contain some images.
b.) Leave everything checked. If you are one of our clients preparing your photos to hand off to us, we recommend doing this as we can deal with the duplicates later on.
5. After making your album selections, hit “Ok” and then navigate down and hit “Next step”
6. Leave “Transfer to:” as “Send download link via email”, and make sure “Export Once” is selected.
7. Download your files as .zip files. We recommend choosing 2GB-4GB as your zip file sizes.
8. Click on “Create Export”
9. When your files are ready to be downloaded (this may take a few days) Google will send you an email with a link to download your .zip files
10. IMPORTANT: If you are one of our clients preparing your photos to hand off to us, DO NOT OPEN THE .ZIP FILES after downloading them, just put the .zip files onto your external hard drives to hand off to us. It is important those files STAY zipped, as we need them that way to import them into our preferred photo management software.