How to Export and Import Your Google Photos Library With Google Takeout

Google Photos doesn't offer a bulk "download my whole library" button in the app either — it goes through the same Google Takeout export as Drive, with its own quirks around metadata, albums and file naming. Here's how to get a clean, complete export.

Start the export from Takeout

At Google Takeout, deselect everything except Google Photos. You can narrow the export to specific albums or a date range if you don't want your entire library at once, though for a full migration it's usually simpler to take everything in one pass. Choose .zip as the file type and pick an archive size — the same trade-off as any large Takeout export: smaller archives are easier to recover from if one fails, larger ones mean fewer files to manage.

What you actually get: photos plus JSON files

This is the part that surprises people. Each photo or video comes with a matching .json file containing metadata — the original timestamp, GPS location if it was captured, and which albums it belonged to. The image or video file itself is the original, unmodified — but the timestamp on the file as it sits on your disk may not match the JSON's "photo taken" time, because that's a separate piece of metadata, not always baked into the file itself.

If preserving exact capture dates matters to you — for sorting a photo archive chronologically later — keep the JSON files alongside the images rather than deleting them as clutter. Several free tools exist specifically to write that JSON timestamp back into the image file's own metadata if your next destination doesn't read the JSON separately.

Albums don't carry over as folders automatically

Photos organizes your library by album, not by folder — Takeout reflects that by creating a folder per album in the export, but a photo that's in multiple albums will appear more than once in the export (in each album's folder), not just once. Decide before you upload whether you want to keep that structure, flatten it into one library, or handle albums as tags instead — it's much easier to make that call once, on your local disk, than to reorganize after everything's already uploaded.

Uploading into an encrypted vault

Once extracted, treat it like any large folder upload: our folder upload keeps the structure you choose, and every photo is encrypted client-side before it reaches our servers — including the metadata inside it, if you keep the JSON files bundled alongside. If your library is genuinely large, consider uploading in batches by year or album rather than all at once, so a connection hiccup only costs you re-running one batch, not the whole thing.

A note for photographers and videographers

If you're migrating a working photo library rather than a personal one, storage sizing and file organization matter more — we've written a separate guide specifically for that case.