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This is the closest question the web and is closed to replies: How can I copy a Google Photo Album into a shared Google Drive Folder?

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Summary: Can you copy an organised album of photos via the cloud to Google Drive?
Ideally without downloading them.

I find it silly that I can't organize or archive Albums into Google Drive. It appears they have changed something because originally when I added the Google Photos to GD I remember it working. In fact, I can still find old GD folders in GP search, but not new ones.

Also, I have tried to use the old folders to shuffle groups of photos around, but as soon as I move the group in GD to a new folder, GP associates it with the old album, and even renames it to the old folder name when viewing in GD. So I haven't figured out how to get groups of photos from GP to GD no matter how difficult a method.

This seems like a whole lot of processing to make the photos stay in an Album. It may be partly explained by some of the docs about what happens when folders are deleted, to retain their integrity, or maybe Google thinks as the commentor in the Google Product Forum puts it "this also allows photo comments, so I think it will be more fun :)".

A shame, Google used to be about efficiency with logical search operators in GMail that have been curtailed in search, and now GD can't even be used to organize GPs..

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Albums in Google Photos are completely separate from folders in Google Drive. Thus, you will have to export the photos from Google Photos, and upload them to Google Drive. I'm going to assume you use Backup and Sync to sync your Google Drive with your computer, as that will make this process easier.

You can download the album from Google Photos, and save it in a folder in your Google Drive where you keep your photographs. Then, unzip the folder you downloaded, and add your photos to the shared folder. If you don't use Backup and Sync, the only difference is that uploading the photos to Google Drive is done through the web app (drive.google.com).

I'm sorry that the migration is not done through the cloud. Migration in the opposite direction is supported—you can copy images from Google Drive to Google Photos (syncing was disabled in July 2019). But, photographs were intended to be used in Google Photos—that is why Google doesn't really support migrating the photographs back into Google Drive.

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  • Thanks for your reply @ahorn, it sounds like you're familiar with the project. I don't use B&S, but could try the download/upload scheme to archive old GP Albums. I have about 30 Albums, and there is no way to manually sort them, so as soon as I add a missing photo to an old album that is newer than my current working albums, it moves it to the middle of the group making it hard to find (and use) any of them.
    – alchemy
    Commented Feb 19, 2019 at 19:03
  • It's these simple things that make me worry the creators aren't listening to feedback from actual users and are more interested in using the images for ML recognition of human curated photos. I know that's not entirely the case, but really, how is one supposed to use Albums after they're all cluttered and mixed together?
    – alchemy
    Commented Feb 19, 2019 at 19:04
  • You have a good point. I also want to be able to organise my albums. I would like to be able to group albums into folders. You can give your feedback to Google using the app > go to the menu, and select "Send feedback".
    – ahorn
    Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 4:49

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