How To Back Up Google Photos (Hint: Do Not Use TakeOut!)

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share the method that I use to back up Google Photos to my laptop and ultimately to an external drive.

I've spent the better part of the last week and a half trying to figure out how to properly back up from Google Photos.  I spent a lot of time doing the wrong thing, so I'm hoping to help YOU avoid wasting that time.

First of all, let's cover why I'd want to back up my photos anyway.  After all, Google's servers are presumably redundant (meaning the information is stored in multiple places), so I wouldn't lose my photos even if Google had a fire or other catastrophe at a single server location.  So, this goes to the paranoia most of us feel about photos.  They are precious and irreplaceable.  They are the 2nd thing people would save in a fire, right behind money -- and to be honest, I would save them before money -- if I didn't have any other copies.  And even though Google is a giant corporation and surely will be around for a good long time, what's to say that someday they won't close down shop?  I just want to make sure that my photos won't disappear right along with them.  

The first tool I tried is Google's Takeout tool (takeout.google.com), which is supposed to allow you to extract and download the data from any of their many services: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Voice, YouTube, etc. etc.   Getting it to start the download was fairly easy.  I just went to the Takeout page and deselected everything except for Google Photos.  Takeout says that I have 40 GB of photos to extract.  I went through the whole process, confirmed by email that I instigated the export and ended up with 20 files to download -- each a zip file containing about 2 GB of data.  So, I spent a good chunk of a couple of days downloading these to my computer -- you had to do them one at a time or the download would fail and they each took 15-20 minutes.   Here is the problem: I envisioned this zip file being a big folder with a bunch of my photos zipped into it, preferably chronologically, but that is NOT the mess that Takeout actually delivers.  Instead, I got this disaster of DAILY folders and duplicate files.  And here is the kicker, instead of storing the photo metadata within the file -- like date, location, caption, etc. -- Takeout removes it and puts it into a SEPARATE file with a json extension.  So, for every photo, you have a separate file that you have to open up to determine when the photo was taken.  Since the photos were not exported chronologically, I could not figure out how on earth I was going to sort through this mess to find anything.  So, I ended up bailing on this option.

Here's what I decided to do instead -- I had already created Albums for each quarter of the year.  I really got my first digital camera in late 2001, so I started the quarter system in 2002.  My albums are named 2002 Q1, 2002 Q2, etc..  I have 4 albums per year until present day.  I have fewer pictures before that, so my albums are a little less formally structured.  I like this organization method since it allows me to group things for searching more easily.  If I want to find beach photos, I go directly to Q3 of each year, for holiday photos, I can go to Q4.  But for the purposes of backing up, the calendar year quarter organization system is perfect because, although there is no option to download all of your photos, you can download all of the photos in an album.  The maximum number you can download is 500.  Again, I had some quarters that were close to that number, but none that were above, so it worked well for me.  If you are a professional photographer or way more serious about taking photos than I am, you may want to be more granular in your organizational system, but I'll leave that to you -- just remember, you can download a maximum of 500 photos from an album at a time.

Just a quick note about albums, they are really just tags.  You can delete an album without deleting any of the photos -- those all stay in your Photos list.  Even though I had all of these albums already set up, I really wanted to make sure every photo in my collection was accounted for in an album, so I deleted all of the quarterly albums and started from scratch.  Basically, if you select a photo using the blue checkmark and hold down the shift button, when you select the next photo, it will also select every one in between those two.  Because Google Photos naturally sorts chronologically, it was tedious, but fairly straightforward to create these 80+ folders and ensure every photo was included in an album.  I used a spreadsheet for this to help a) remember which albums I had already created b) what months were in each quarter because I'm flaky about that and c) which ones I have already downloaded.  Once I got all of the albums created, it was time to download.  Go into the album, select the 3 dots, and choose Download All.  This will end up in your Download folder as a zip file and looks precisely the way that I THOUGHT the Takeout extract would look.  All of your photos are in there.  I was dismayed at first that the date of the file had been overwritten with the date of the download -- or today's date.  So, I don't love this, BUT that really is just the date the file was modified, the download DOES preserves metadata from the photo.  Just open up the photo, choose file info and you can see the date the photo was taken, time, device, and location.  Phew.  Plus, all of your photos are stored in folders that tell you the calendar year and quarter, so you know where to look.  

I downloaded each of these albums, which in this case you CAN do multiple albums at a time so it takes less time, and then moved them all over to my external drive for safe keeping.  Then every quarter, I organize all of the photos from the last quarter into an album, download the album, and move it to my external drive.  I don't keep my external drive in any sort of fireproof safe or bank vault -- I figure the likelihood that Google will go belly up AND my house will catch on fire AT THE SAME TIME is fairly small.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!