Best way to migrate Google Account to another

Question

I'm looking to migrate my current account, created years ago when I was a child and with a badly unprofessional nickname, to another more serious Google account.

My current account is connected to many services and has also a Google Drive billing associated to. I have Photos on Google Photos and a Google+ Profile with pages. Moreover I have bought Android Apps on Google Play Store.

The Google Takeout tool is less useful then before, is not possible anymore to migrate automatically the Google+ connections and circles.

For what I can understand the situation will take a lot of effort; in any case what would the best strategy be to migrate completely a Google account to another?

Answer 1

Was your original Google account created with a gmail address (eg youngster@gmail.coem)? If so, then I don't believe that there is one solution for this. Instead, you need to transfer ownership of the artifacts created by each individual service to the new account. This is more than just taking a copy of the data and making it available to the 2nd account (what Takeout can help with), it's about giving control of the orignal data to the new account.

The way to do this is different for each service (and it's possible that there are services that don't have a method for doing it. Ones I know something about:

• You can use Picasa web albums to transfer ownership of photos (includes Google Photos and Google+ Photos) to the new account. The last time I looked, it was only possible to do this once in the lifetime of the albums - so make sure you get it right the first time.
• Feedburner - transferring ownership of feeds is very easy, read about it in their help.
• Gmail - is the one service where you don't transfer ownership, just use Takeout to tranfer the contents.
• Blogger - itself is simple enough to transfer blog ownership, but the problems arrive if you want to move photos as well: the links may bread.

On the other hand, if your original account name is not a gmail address (eg youngster@oldISPmailService.com), then you can simply:

• Create a new professional email account somewhere (eg
  grown-up@myDomain.com)
• Switch the primary email address associated with the Google account to the new email.
• Set a the display name for your Google account to something professional.
• Check the display names in any associated services which have their own separate profiles (eg Blogger did, and I think still does)
• Keep logging in to Google using the original account name, but confident that no one else is seeing it any more.

Answer 2

In my experience, when I needed to move my Gmail, Drive, Contacts, and other apps data, I ended up using g-transfer. It was a way better option than Google Takeout (as you said, there are even more problems with Takeout now--and g-transfer seems to have gotten it right so far).

The only problem is that if you have linked stuff to your Google Play store or billing etc, you will need to do that stuff individually. It can be a bit of a pain, but seriously when g-transfer takes care of the other stuff, it will make it much less daunting. It puts a copy of your account data into another Google account and takes like a minute to do.