Are you familiar with Google Takeout?

[RonSijm]

Recently I wanted to switch from Google photos to a different cloud provider, and was looking for a way to get all my data out of google.

I came across this project (gphotos-sync) - but after some more googling, I also came across google takeout - Which lets you download everything from Google Photos at once, at the original quality. (so it bypasses all the API limitations such as transcoding and downscaling of images)

If use-case is that you're actively syncing your photos from google cloud to somewhere else, the takeout doesn't seem the best option..

But if your use-case is just that you want to take everything out of google, the google takeout is pretty good

[gilesknap]

Yes I agree with your statement.

The only issue with Google Takeout is that the results are not prettily organized. Someone needs to write a Takeout organizer. I have considered it in the past but it would be a one off, because the Takeout process is laborious for a large library. Hence I'd only bother to do the work if I was planning on exiting Google for good.

Despite the lock-in issues with the Google Photos API I'm still finding the service too good to exit.

[KjeldsenDK]

Google takeout is useless except for a disaster backup, there is zero support for albums.

[gilesknap]

I did not know that, I have not looked at it for a long time - my recollection was that it included duplicate files for all items in albums, but that may be a false memory.