Sorry but I can’t think of another word for it right now. This is mostly just venting but also if anyone has a better way to do it I wouldn’t hate to hear it.
I’m trying to set up a home server for all of our family photos. We’re on our way to de-googling, and part of the impetus for the change is that our Google Drive is almost full.We have a few hundred gigs of photos between us. The problem with trying to download your data from Google is that it will only allow you to do so in a reasonable way through Google takeout. First you have to order it. Then you have to wait anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for Google to “prepare” the download. Then you have one week before the takeout “expires.” That’s one week to the minute from the time of the initial request.
I don’t have some kind of fancy California internet, I just have normal home internet and there is just no way to download a 50gig (or 2 gig) file in one go - there are always intrruptions that require restarting the download. But if you try to download the files too many times, Google will give you another error and you have to start over and request a new takeout. Google doesn’t let you download the entire archive either, you have to select each file part individually.
I can’t tell you how many weeks it’s been that I’ve tried to download all of the files before they expire, or google gives me another error.
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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.
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.
Instead of having to do an Operating system setup with a cloud provider, maybe another cloud backup service would work. Something like Backblaze can receive your Google files. Then you can download from Backblaze at your leisure.
https://help.goodsync.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003419711-Backblaze-B2
Or use the filters by date to limit the amount of takeout data that’s created? Then repeat with different filters for the next chunk.
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.
Because Google don’t want you to export your photos. They want you to depend on them 100%.
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
This route may be the answer. I didn’t have success so far in setting up a download manager that offered any real improvements over the browser. I wanted to avoid my photos being on two corporate services, but as you say, in theory everything is delete-able.
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.
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When you setup the Google Takeout export choose Save in a Google Drive folder
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Install the Google Drive PC client (Drive for desktop)
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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.
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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.
Any recommendations? Windows or Linux?
jDownloader
It is the most patient downloader I know.
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
It could absolutely be worse. The main problem is the lack of flexibility - If I could ask for an extension after downloading 80% of the files over a week, that would be helpful for example. I’m also beginning to suspect that they cap the download speed because I am seeing similar speeds on my home and work network…
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.
The word you’re looking for is “petty.”
It’s called: vendor lock-in.
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
Oh dang, sorry about that. I’ve used rclone with great results (slurping content out of Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.), but I never actually tried the Google Photos backend.
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.
Not really helping you here. But when I started using Google Photos, I still manually downloaded files from my phone to local storage. I did this mainly to ensure I have the original copies of my photos and not some compressed image. Turns out that was a wise move as exporting photos from Google is a pretty damned awful experience.
Well, obviously they don’t want you to!
Have you tried mounting the google drive on your computer and copying the files with your file manager?
