How To Download All Your Pictures And Videos From Google Photos At Once
Google Photos is one of the mostpopular cloud-based services for storing photos and videos. If you’ve been using Google Photos for a while, there may come a time when you want to download all your photos and videos. This could be for various reasons, such astransferring your Google Photos files to another platform, creating an offline backup, or freeing up storage space on your Google account. The good news is that it’s possible to download all your content from Google Photos in one go.
Although Google Photos makes it easy to download specific photos or albums, it doesn’t provide an option to download everything at once, whether you’re using the mobile app or the web app. For this, you will need to use Google Takeout — a tool provided by Google that allows you to export and download data from its various services, including Google Photos.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of requesting and downloading your pictures and videos from Google Photos using Google Takeout, ensuring you have everything you need for backup or migration. So, let’s dive in.
Requesting export using Google Takeout
To download all the media files stored in Google Photos, you’ll first need to request an export of your data. Here are the steps to do so:
Google will begin preparing your photos and videos for download and will send you an email once they are ready.
Downloading and extracting the Google Takeout export file
Depending on the size of your Google Photos collection, the export process can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours — or even days. Once the export is complete, the download process is relatively simple. Here’s what you need to do:
Once downloaded, you canunzip the files on your PCorMacto view all your Google Photos media. Inside the extracted folders, your media will be organized by album, with each album represented by its own folder. Additionally, there will be folders for each year, containing all the photos and videos from that specific time frame. Alongside your media, you’ll also find JSON files that contain metadata for each photo, such as dates, locations, and other details.
As noted in the email, the download links in the Google Takeout email will only be valid for seven days from the date you receive them. If you don’t download your photos and videos within that time frame, the links will expire, and you’ll need to request a new export of your data.
