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Do you know of a way to download photos and videos back from the new http://photos.google.com?

I was expecting at least some unofficial tools like Flickr downloader, but I couldn't find any.

I'm wary of using the service before I find out how to get data back in case of problems.

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Google Photos is one of the products included in Google Takeout. You can even select exactly which albums you want to download. It will take some time, but once the archive is ready you'll receive an email with a (private) link for you to download your data.

Albums will get their own folders within the archive. Photos not in albums appear to get put in folders based on date. Also, if the archive is too large for a single zip file, it will be broken up in to smaller chunks. (For me, each file was 2GB.)

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    Does Google Takeout keep the EXIF metadata? How does Google Takeout handle photo descriptions and texts added to albums?
    – robert
    Sep 16, 2016 at 18:12
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    @robert That sounds like something you should ask as a separate question.
    – ale
    Sep 16, 2016 at 18:15
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    I just tried with some test images. EXIF data is kept on the image files. Also, along with each image, a JSON file is exported which contains the description of the image entered in Google Photos webinterface (as well as comments). And if you edited the image in Google Photos, the image will be exported in the original version in addition to the edited version.
    – robert
    Sep 16, 2016 at 18:23
  • @robert That sounds like an answer to that separate question. Remember that comments are meant to be temporary.
    – ale
    Sep 16, 2016 at 19:36
  • You have an additional option to download as tgz, in which case single file can be as large as 50GB
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Jan 24, 2020 at 9:50
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If you use the option in Google Drive to add a folder for your Google Photos, and sync to your hard drive with the Google Drive software, you'll automatically have a local backup of all your photos.

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    Where does one configure this?
    – duality_
    Sep 15, 2018 at 19:51

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