30-04-2021

Photos Takeout



Photos Takeout

Photos Takeout (no doubt a play on the name of Google’s own Takeout data service):

Find takeout food stock images in HD and millions of other royalty-free stock photos, illustrations and vectors in the Shutterstock collection. Thousands of new, high-quality pictures added every day. Google Takeout helps you create an archive with your data from Google products that include Google Drive as well as Google Photos. Users can select different services from the list of options provided. Takeout will then process the request and put all the files into a zip file.

Export photos and videos from Photos on Mac in yearwise, album-wise or moment/date-wise folders. Save them in neat folders on Mac, Google Drive, Dropbox, external drive or any other location. For macOS Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave and High Sierra.

A recent commenter on a post I wrote about Photos back in 2018 recommended this app for exporting libraries from Apple’s bundled library format. In that post I argued that Apple’s way of storing photos, and their metadata, is not a good longterm solution.

I’ve since done all of this manually and moved away from allowing Photos for Mac to manage the structure and metadata of my photo library – opting for my own system and using Photos as a “viewer and sorter” of that library.

PhotosGoogle photos takeout github

Google Photos Takeout Json

The pricing options of this app would have meant a $60 fee to move my photos and metadata at the time. If this app works as advertised, I would have paid that without question. I’m sharing it today in case any of you would like to move away from allowing Photos to choose how to store your images.

Photos Takeout

  1. Using Google Takeout to download all your photos and videos including backed up files from Android and iOS mobile uploads (Google Photos app) or via the desktop uploader (Google Photos Backup).
  2. Go to https://www.google.com/settings/takeout and log in using a desktop computer
  3. Under 'Select data to include,' click the 'Select none' button
  4. Scroll down to 'Google photos' and click into the box (the check mark will be in a green box)
  5. Left of the box is a small down arrow; click on it
    - 'Include all photo albums' is pre-selected
    - If you want to select specific albums, click 'Select photo albums' and see the 'note' below.
  6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click 'Next'
  7. Choose how you want to get the data
    - File type: choose Zip format
    - Delivery method: Send download link by email
  8. Click 'Create archive'
  9. After awhile, you'll receive an email that says your Zip file is ready to download. Download and unzip the file into a drive that has enough room to store it. The file size could be quite large depending on how many photos are in your collection.
  10. You can also rename the zip at this time
  11. Click 'Save' and specify a location to download
  12. Unzip the zip file
  13. In Windows Explorer, right-click the zip file, click 'Extract All' then 'Extract'
  14. When unzipping is finished, you may delete the zip file