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We’re big fans ofGoogle Photosas this is a great tool for backing up your photos to the cloud with ease and accessing them from multiple devices.
If you ever want to download your photos though, it might be a bit more fiddly, especially if you’re looking to download all your photos in one go. So we’re here to help guide you through the process to make things easier.
It could be that you have a few different reasons to download your photos from Google Photos.
It might be a cost-cutting measure to save on theGoogle Onefees or perhaps you’re planning on moving toAmazon PhotosorApple iCloudand want to back up your images there.
It may also be sensible to download your Google Photos library for other reasons as well. If you’vefreed up storage on your phone, for example by deleting your photos locally, then the only copy will be with Google Photos. What if the worst happens and your account gets hacked and you can no longer access Google Photos? Hopefully, you can regain access to your account,change your passwordand set uptwo-factor authenticationbut you might still have lost some photos or videos in one way or another.
So to save your precious memories you might want to download the images and back them up locally too - on anexternal drive, NAS or just on your PC orlaptop.
Let’s face it Google has a habit of shutting down services without much warning as well, so it pays to be prepared.
There are a few different ways to download photos from Google Photos. You can do it from your phone (as we’ll detail below) but it’s far easier to do from your computer, especially if you’re planning on backing up a lot of photos and that’s where you’ll store them.
So these are the steps for bulk downloading your photos with relative ease. To do it you’ll need to use Google Takeout.
Takeout is a service that allows you to export or back up a copy of the data Google holds on you for its various services. You can use it for all sorts of things including exporting your contacts, calendar, Google Drive files,location historyand more.
Your Google Photos bulk export will then begin, but unfortunately, it’s not an immediate thing and you will need to wait a while for the process to happen. This might be hours or even days, according to Google’s support information. So a little patience is going to be required.
If you don’t want to download all your photos from Google Photos but instead just want to download a particular album or several albums then that’s possible too. If you have sorted photos into albums logically in Google Photos then you can download them with Google Takeout.
Create an album for downloading in Google Photos
Another way to download images from Google Photos is to use albums.
If you only want to download certain photos rather than all of the photos on your Google Photos account then albums are the way to go. Create an album and then you can download it using the steps above we recommended for using Google Takeout:
Then head over to Google Takeout and follow the steps above.
If you already have albums created in Google Photos and you know which ones you want then you may also directly download them without fuss. This is a good way to download albums quickly and easily to your PC and might be faster than exporting through Google Takeout. Downloading albums this way will put all the images into a zip file and download them immediately.
If you’re only looking to download specific photos or a selection of images from Google Photos then you can do that too. Google makes it easy to select whole days, so if you’ve been busy taking a lot of photos on one day and want to grab them all quickly then you can do that easily.
Unfortunately, if you’re hoping to download Google Photos images from the app on yourfavourite smartphonethe process isn’t as straightforward. This does make some sense as most people will have small internal storage and you wouldn’t want to fill yourphone up and slow it down.
It is still possible to download individual photos, but you cannot bulk download Google Photos as is possible using the desktop app or Google Takeout.
you’re able to download individual photos this way but unfortunately, it’s not possible to select multiple photos and download them.
