If you have not heard the news yet, Google is changing the settings for its photo storage. This means it might be time for you to get started on sorting your google photos storage out. One of the most common ways out of this is to copy all your photos from google photos to your laptop or another storage device. If you are unaware of how to download photos from google photos, this article will show you how to do it.
According to Google, “As of June 1, 2021, if you’re out of storage or over quota, you won’t be able to back up additional photos and videos. If you’re over quota for 24 months, your content may be impacted.” This clearly means you might even lose some of your photos if you don’t consider the update and make changes accordingly.
Moving onto the process of downloading your photos. For someone who has been using Google Photos for a while, you will know that it is more of an individual download process. Now, every person’s photo library is completely different in terms of size and structure as well as the system of their phone. Here’s how you can go about downloading photos differently.
Individually
The easiest and most efficient way so far has been ‘downloading individual photos’. As a one-person entity, your personal photograph collection in your phone might not be that big, barring specific cases. These specific cases can include instances when you have not created a backup or moved your photos from the phone in a very long while.
Additionally, this can also mean you are into a job or line of work that requires a lot of data storage. This can include any of the myriads of jobs within digital marketing these days. Content strategy, social media management, copywriting and so many other types of digital marketing jobs require quick on-the-spot research and that means using your phone for it. Regardless of your job or any other reason, your photo library is personal to you and which is why it cannot be uniform.
The individual download approach might not be for someone with massive amounts of data in the form of photos. This means you will need to go to each individual photo and do a 2-3 step process to download each photo. This might take you forever depending upon the size of your data. However, the choice is completely yours. Here’s how you go about it.
- There are two ways you can access your google photos, if you are using them on your phone you can directly download the Google Photos application. If you are using the browser on your laptop/PC you’ll need to go to com/photos.
- Connect your photos app on your phone to your Google ID, or sign into another one. The same goes for the photos web page on your laptop.
- All of your photos that are already synced will show up as soon as you sign in. Go to whichever picture you want to start from, on the top right corner you will find a menu option, click on that and select
- There is an option to do this collectively by selecting multiple pictures as well, but this might compress all the pictures in one single zip file that you might need to extract it from.
By album
In case you were smart about your photo storage in Google Photos as well, you might have saved your photos in albums. If the pictures are in albums within your Google Photos backup, you can download them collectively by album.
On the main page of Google Photos, you will find a folder/page that shows all your albums simultaneously. This will also follow the procedure of compressing all the photos in one single zipped folder when it’s downloaded. But this will be easier for you to extract since the albums are made by you and will be sorted together already. Follow the same step as the above method, but instead of individual pictures select the menu on one album and select Download All.
All at once
The final one that many would prefer, because it seems an easy bet instead of downloading your pictures manually, one by one. This will require a tool that you will have to access, the Google Takeout. This is ideal in case even downloading albums seems too much work for you. Takeout is in its ultimate form, a google service that lets you download data in the form of an archived file.
The process of how to download photos from google photos is made easy with it when you just do the process once successfully. Additionally to photos, Takeout lets you download all kinds of data you have stored online on your Google account. Including not just documents, notes, voice recording but also your search history.
On the main page of Google Takeout, after you are logged in, you will find a list of data options and checkboxes beside it. Depending upon your needs, check just photos or anything else you additionally want to download with the pictures. Within Google Photos you will have an option to check some albums off or some photos in a specific time period. Check whatever you need in and move forward to downloading the files.
This ends the three ways to download your photos from google photos to any of your devices. Make sure you backup your photos properly, and to be extra careful keep a comprehensive structure to help you sort and store them accordingly. Keep yourself updated on the Google updates on their service as well, in addition to any free services you use online to avoid any sudden changes in services you require.