There's no financial incentive for them to make is easy to leave Google. Takeout only exists to comply with regulations (e.g. digital markets act), and as usual, they're doing the bare minimum to not get sued.
Or why is Google Takeout as good as it is? It's got no business being as useful as it is in a profit-maximizing corpo. 😂 It can be way worse while still technically compliant. Or expect Takeout to get worse over time as Google looks into undermaximized profit streams.
Probably because the individual engineers working on Takeout care about doing a good job, even though the higher-ups would prefer something half-assed. I work for a major tech company and I've been in that same situation before, e.g. when I was working on GDPR compliance. I read the GDPR and tried hard to comply with the spirit of the law, but it was abundantly clear everyone above me hadn't read it and only cared about doing the bare minimum.
Most likely. Plus Takeout appeared way before Google was showing any profit maximization signs and didn't even hold the monopoly position it does hold today.
Honestly I thought you were going to bitch about them separating your metadata from the photos and you then having to remerge them with a special tool to get them to work with any other program.
omg they WHAT
I'm not really looking forward to that step either
Lmao I am both amused and horrified that I had somehow never come across this datapoint before
immich has a great guide to move a takeout from google into immich
Links or it didn't happen
Thank you! The goal is to set up immich. It's my first real foray into self hosting, and it seems close enough to feature parity with Google that the family will go for it. I ran a test with my local photos and it works great, so this is the next step.
I know it’s not ideal, but if you can afford it, you could rent a VPS in a cloud provider for a week or two, and do the download from Google Takeout on that, and then use sync or similar to copy the files to your own server.
I don't know how to do any of that but I know it will help to know anyway. I'll look into it. Thanks
Be completely dumb and install a desktop OS like Ubuntu Desktop. Then remote into it, and use the browser just as normal to download the stuff on it. We'll help you with moving the data off it to your local afterwards. Critically the machine has to have as much storage as needed to store all of your download.
I was gonna suggest the same.
Google takeout is there so they are technically compliant with rules that say you must be able to download your personal data, but they make it so inconvenient to use that practically it's almost impossible to download it. Google photos isn't a backup service so much as a way for Google to hold your photos hostage until you start paying for higher amounts of storage. And by the time you need that storage, Google takeout download has become impractical.
It doesn't have an option to split it?
When I did my Google takeout to delete all my pics from Google photos there was an option to split in like "one zip every 2gb"
The first time I tried it in the two gigabyte blocks. The problem with that is I have to download them one or two at a time. It's not very easy to do over the course of a week on a normal internet connection. Keep in mind, I also have a job.
I got about 50 out of 60 files before the one week timer reset and I had to start all over.
Apparently you can save it to Google drive then download the Google drive program and make that folder available offline so it downloads it to the computer.
When you setup the Google Takeout export choose Save in a Google Drive folder
Install the Google Drive PC client (Drive for desktop)
It will create a new drive (i.e. G:) in your explorer. Right click on the takeout folder and select "Make available offline". All files in that folder will be downloaded by the Google Drive Desktop in the background, and you will be able to copy to another location, as they will be local files.
You could look into using a download manager. No reason for you to manually start each download in sequence if there's a way to get your computer to automatically start the next as soon as one finishes.
I think this is a bit unfair. Most Google Takeout requests are fulfilled in seconds or minutes. Obviously collating 100GB of photos into a zip takes time.
And it's not googles fault you have internet issues: even a fairly modest 20Mbps internet connection can do 50GB in 6h. If you have outages that's on your ISP not Google. As others have said, have it download to a VPS or Dropbox etc then sync it from there. Or call your ISP and tell them to sort your line out, I've had 100℅ uptime on my VDSL copper line for over 2 years.
I was able to use Google Takeout and my relatively modest 50Mbps connection to successfully Takeout 200GB of data in a couple of days.
What download manager did you use? I've tried with whatever's built into Firefox on two different networks and similar results. The downloads freeze every so often and I have to restart them (it picks up where it left off). Sometimes it just won't reconnect, which I'm guessing is a timeout issue with Google, although I really have no idea.
I don't ever have to manage downloads of this size, so sorry if it's an obvious question
Not OP, but I use this download manager. It has been good.
Definitely misread that as Download The Mall and was quite amused by the name until I checked the link to see more lol
A download manager I found to work well generally was aria2c. Only really worth it if you are on linux but it is simple yet powerful.
Google takeout is the best gdpr compliant platform of all the big tech giants. Amazon for example lets you wait until the very last day they legally can.
Also they do minimal processing like with the metadata (as others commented) as it is probably how they internally store it and that's what they need to deliver. The simple fact that you can select what you want to request and not having to download everything about you makes it good in my eyes.
I actually see good faith compliance with the gdpr in the Plattform
Not sure if somebody mentioned, but you can export to one drive. So you can get a 1TB account for a free trial or for a single month and export everything there as simple files, no large zips. Then with the app download to the computer and then cancel one drive.
Pretend to be in California/EU and then ask full removal of all your data on both Microsoft and google
Because Google don’t want you to export your photos. They want you to depend on them 100%.
Can you do one album at a time? Select the albums you want to download, then do that file. Then do the next few albums. That way you have direct control over the data you're getting in each batch, and so you'll have a week to get that batch instead of having to start again if the whole thing didn't finish in a week.
That may be a thought. I could organize the photos first and then do multiple takeouts. Thanks
I have fancy California Internet and the downloads are surprisingly slow and kept slowing down and turning off. It was such a pain to get my data out of takeout.
Just gone through this whole process myself. My god does it suck. Another thing you'll want to be aware of around Takeout with Google Photos is that the photo metadata isn't attached as EXIF like with a normal service, but rather it's given as an accompanying JSON file for each image file. I'm using Memories for Nextcloud, and it has a tool that can restore the EXIF metadata using those files, but it's not exact and now I have about 1.5k images tagged as being from this year when they're really from 2018 or before. I'm looking at writing my own tool to restore some of this metadata but it's going to be a right pain in the ass.
Wow thanks for that. I was looking into https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper but I haven't gotten to that step yet
It's bad because they don't want you to use it, but they made it exist so that they don't get sued by the European Union.
The word you're looking for is "petty."
Try this then do them one at the time. You have to start the download in your browser first, but you can click "pause" and leave the browser open as it downloads to your server
There was an option to split the download into archives of customizable size IIRC
It's called: vendor lock-in.
Use Drive or if it's more than 15GB or whatever the max is these days. Pay for storage for one month for a couple of dollars on one of the supported platforms and download from there.
Have you tried mounting the google drive on your computer and copying the files with your file manager?
From a search, it seems photos are no longer accessible via Google Drive and photos downloaded through the API (such as with Rclone) are not in full resolution and have the EXIF data stripped.
Google really fuck over anyone using Google Photos as a backup.
Yeah, with takeout, there are tools that can reconstruct the metadata. I think Google includes some JSONs or something like that. It's critical to maintain the dates of the photos.
Also I think if I did that I would need double the storage, right? To sync the drive and to copy the files?
Well, obviously they don't want you to!
You could try using rclone's Google Photos backend. It's a command line tool, sort of like rsync but for cloud storage. https://rclone.org/
Looked promising until
When Images are downloaded this strips EXIF location (according to the docs and my tests). This is a limitation of the Google Photos API and is covered by bug #112096115.
The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort
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