We’re big fans of Google Photos as it’s a great tool for easily backing up your photos to the cloud and accessing them across multiple devices.
However, if you ever want to download your photos, it can be a bit trickier, especially if you’re looking to download all your photos in one go. So we’re here to help guide you through the process to make things easy.
Why you could download Google Photos
It may be that you have a few different reasons for downloading your photos from Google Photos.
It might be a cost-cutting measure to save on Google One fees or maybe you’re planning to move to Amazon Photos or Apple iCloud and want to back up your pictures there.
It may also be sensible to download your Google Photos library for other reasons. If you’ve freed up storage on your phone, for example by deleting your photos locally, then the only copy will be with Google Photos. What if the worst happens and your account gets hacked and you can no longer access Google Photos? Hopefully, you can regain access to your account, change your password, and set up two-factor authentication, but you may still have lost some photos or videos one way or another.
So, to save your precious memories, you may want to download the images and back them up locally too, to an external drive, NAS, or just to your PC or laptop.
Let’s face it, Google also has a habit of shutting down services without notice, so it pays to be prepared.
How to Download Your Google Photos to Your Computer
There are a few different ways to download photos from Google Photos. You can do it from your phone (as we’ll detail below), but it’s much easier to do it from your computer, especially if you plan to back up a lot of photos and that’s where you’ll store them.
These are the steps to download your photos in bulk with relative ease. To do this you will need to use Google Takeout.
Takeout is a service that allows you to export or back up a copy of the data Google holds about you for its various services. You can use it for all sorts of things, including exporting your contacts, calendar, Google Drive files, location history, and more.
- While logged in to Google account, you want to download headshots to Google Takeout
- By default, everything is selected for download, so click “deselect all”
- Scroll down the list of options (or Ctrl+F to search) and find Google Photos
- Click the checkbox next to Google Photos
- Scroll down to the bottom and click “next step”
- You can then choose where to download Google Photos: the download goes to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box.
- If you select “send download link via email”, you will be able to download them directly to your computer
- At this stage, you can also set a download frequency so that you can export only once or all of two months for a year.
- You can also choose the file type and size from the other dropdown menus. Select .zip and the largest file size for best results
- Click “Create Export” to continue
Then the bulk export from Google Photos will start, but unfortunately, it is not an immediate thing and you will need to wait for some time for the process to take place. This can be hours or even days, depending on Google support information. So a little patience will be required.
Download Google Photos albums
If you don’t want to download all your photos from Google Photos, but just want to download a particular album or multiple albums, that’s also possible. If you have logically arranged your photos into albums in Google Photos, you can download them using Google Takeout.
- While logged in to Google account, you want to download headshots to Google Takeout
- By default, everything is selected for download, so click “deselect all”
- Scroll down the list of options (or Ctrl+F to search) and find Google Photos
- Click the checkbox next to Google Photos
- Find the option “All photo albums included” and click on it
- In the next popup window, click on deselect all
- Then check the album or albums you want to download and click OK
- Scroll down to the bottom and click “next step”
- You can then choose where to download Google Photos: the download goes to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box.
- If you select “send download link via email”, you will be able to download them directly to your computer
- At this stage, you can also set a download frequency so that you can export only once or all of two months for a year.
- You can also choose the file type and size from the other dropdown menus. Select .zip and the largest file size for best results
- Click “Create Export” to continue
Create an album to download in Google Photos
Another way to download images from Google Photos is to use albums.
If you only want to download certain photos instead of all the photos in your Google Photos account, then albums are the way to go. Create an album and then you can download it by following the steps above that we recommend for using Google Takeout:
- Go to Google Photos on your desktop browser and sign in if you haven’t already.
- Find the photos you want to download and check the small circle at the top right to select them
- Once you have selected the correct photos, click the plus icon at the top of the page
- Select Album from the options
- Then add to an album or click to create a new album
- Give the album a name and click the checkmark on the top left to save the album.
Then head over to Google Takeout and follow the steps above.
Download Google Photos albums from Google Photos on your PC
If you already have albums created in Google Photos and know which ones you want, you can also download them directly without any hassle. This is a great way to quickly and easily download albums to your PC and may be faster than exporting them via Google Takeout. Downloading albums this way will put all the images in a zip file and download them immediately.
- Go to Google Photos on your desktop browser and sign in if you haven’t already.
- Find the album you want to download by clicking “Albums” in the menu on the left and then clicking “see all albums”
- Click on the album
- At the top right of the album, click the three-dot menu icon
- Then click “download all” from the options
- Wait for the zip file to download, then unzip and enjoy
How to download individual photos from Google Photos
If you’re just looking to download specific photos or a selection of images, then from Google Photos, you can do that too. Google makes it easy to select whole days, so if you’ve been busy taking a lot of photos in a day and want to snap them all quickly, you can easily do so.
- Go to Google Photos on your desktop browser and sign in if you haven’t already.
- Find the photo(s) you wish to download and click on the little circle at the top left of the image(s) this will select them
- Note that you can click on a day and automatically select all images for that day
- At the top right of the site, click the three-dot menu
- Click download or you can just press shift+D
- Wait for the images to download
Download Google Photos from the app
Unfortunately, if you want to download Google Photos images from the app on your favorite smartphone, the process is not that simple. This makes sense since most people will have small internal storage and you don’t want to fill up your phone and slow it down.
It’s still possible to download individual photos, but you can’t download Google Photos in bulk like you can with the desktop app or Google Takeout.
- Open the Google Photos app on your phone
- Select the photo you want to download and open it
- At the top right of the screen, tap on the three-dot menu
- In the bottom menu, select download
You can download individual photos this way, but unfortunately it is not possible to select multiple photos and download them.
