Why?

Simple. If you’re paying for another service, such as Microsoft OneDrive (Which in my opinion is MUCH better priced), you may want to download ALL of your Google Photos data. Videos, pictures, albums, and everything else.

Of course, you can expect a large download, but once it’s done you can access pretty much everything you could on Google Photos.

This guide is NOT telling you to tick everything and download it through your browser, of course.

How to download everything from Google Photos

Simple. Use another Google service, called Google Takeout. This is a service offered by Google that allows you to request your data and information, and download them from Google’s servers. We’ll be using it to download everything from Google Photos.

Head to the link above, and under CREATE A NEW EXPORT, click Deselect all, assuming you don’t want to download a lot of unnecessary info and data.

Scroll until you see Google Photos, and tick it. Now we can view the formats that will be downloaded:

• Photos in Original formats, PNG, JPG and WEBP
• Videos in Original formats and MP4
• Album metadata in JSON
• Photo metadata in JSON

If you’re moving to another platform like OneDrive - as in planning to upload everything there, then delete it (or keep it) on your Google Account, then you’re only looking for the actual images and videos. Everything else can be disregarded.

If you’re a programmer, the other file formats may interest you.

We can also click All photo albums included to manage what albums we want downloaded. You can create an album and include everything you don’t want in the download on the Google Photos website before you download a package of everything.

Once you’re happy, with Google Photos being the only one ticked, or possibly more if you’re interested: Click Next step.

You can now select Send download link via email to get links to ZIP files containing all your images and videos, or, assuming you have cloud storage space you can select from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box.

The easiest is email, as that won’t use your cloud storage space.

File type as .zip is good enough and most likely the easiest for you.

You can then choose an archive size of 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 10 GB, or 50 GB. If your internet is reliable enough to survive long downloads, choose 50GB. Anything less may result in TONS of files needing to be downloaded to get all your images and videos off the internet.

Finally, Schedule new export and wait.

If you have Google Advanced Protection, you may be told that it can take many more days to prepare everything, but in my case it was ready overnight.

Downloading your images and videos

Once you’ve sent an email, simply click the included link to download .zips which contain all your images and videos.

Make sure you download them promptly. These downloads will expire, and the .zips will be deleted. To download everything again you’ll need to request another download from Google Takeout.

It’s a simple technique and allows you to collect everything you hold dear, and upload/store them as you choose.