How to transfer photos from Google Photos to your computer

  • Google Photos allows you to store images in the cloud and make local backups.
  • It is essential to make backups to avoid losing important data.
  • Google has limited free storage to 15GB, which may lead to the need to download photos.
  • There are methods to transfer photos to a PC: photo by photo, albums and all content using Google Takeout.

google photos to pc

Those who regularly use Google Photos They know the many advantages that this Google service offers. Like, for example, the possibility of saving our images in the cloud. However, it is also possible to save all our photos from Google Photos on the PC, with the possibility of making a backup copy and, in the process, freeing up space in the cloud (which, contrary to what many believe, is not infinite ). In this article we explain How to transfer photos from Google Photos to your computer.

Many users store huge amounts of photos, videos and images in the cloud. Sometimes for professional reasons, although in most cases these are personal documents and files. Transferring them to the computer is sometimes necessary and, truth be told, it takes a little work.

The Google Photos cloud is a really useful resource. A way of store large amounts of information without having to take up space on our computer's hard drive, with the obvious advantages that this entails. In the cloud, our files are stored securely and accessible to us at any time and from any device on which we are signed in to Google.

Why transfer photos to PC?

Google cloud

If this is so, what is the point of downloading our photos and videos and saving them on our hard drive? There are two main reasons:

  • First of all, because it never hurts to do backup of our photos. And to do that, it is necessary to transfer the photos to the computer and save a local copy there or on an external hard drive. We must consider the possibility, however unlikely it may be, of losing the mobile phone and not having the Google access password saved. In those cases, the backup will save the lost content.
  • Secondly, it must be mentioned Google's recent decision to limit free cloud storage capacity. Now the maximum is only 15 GB. When this limit is reached, no more files are saved there. In fact, perhaps this is the reason why you have come to this article.

When we find ourselves in the situation that we have reached the aforementioned storage limit, the options we have are not many: Access pay a monthly subscription of 1,99 euros to Google One to expand the storage capacity in the cloud, or transfer the photos from Google Photos to the computer and delete them from the cloud, thus freeing up the space occupied. We explain how to do it below:

Methods to transfer photos from Google Photos to your computer

There are three methods possible to perform this operation. Depending on our need or our intention, we will opt for one of them:

Photo by photo

select photos

This is the most intuitive way to perform this operation. By passing the photos one by one, we will have better control over what we are doing, although it will obviously take us much more time. It can be interesting, of course, when we only want to take a certain number of photos for a specific reason. In fact, this is only recommended when we are talking about a small number of photos.

The method is very simple: you just have to open the photo you want to save, click on the three dots icon in the upper right corner and select the "Download" option.

One way to simplify this method a bit is download multiple sets of photos. To do this, you must hover your mouse over the thumbnail image of the photos and click on the check mark in the upper left. In this way you can select a group of photos to later transfer them to the PC.

Download albums

google photos album

The most organized users usually Sort your photos and videos into folders and albums. This makes it easier to search and find specific photos. In addition, this is very helpful when transferring photos from Google Photos to your computer more selectively.

In these cases, the method is to go to the "albums" tab that we find in the left column within the Google Photos web interface. Then you just have to click on the album we want to download, click on the three dots icon (above, right) and select the "Download all" option. By doing this, the images will be compressed for later download to the PC.

This method has the advantage of being able perform selective downloads quickly and easily. In addition, the photos are saved back to our PC in an orderly manner. On the other hand, it should be noted that it does not allow you to download more than a single album at a time. You have to do it one by one.

download all photos

google takeout

To make a "dump" of all the photos saved in Google Photos to our computer, we will have to use a tool called Google Takeout instead of going directly to the Google service interface. With it we will be able to export and save files of all types (also photos), including contacts, our Google Maps and Chrome history, etc.

How can you transfer photos from Google Photos to your PC? First you have to access the Google Takeout service with your user account. There we find a list of all the elements that we can export to our computer.

Although it seems a little overwhelming at first, the truth is that the service itself guides us in the task of selecting the elements (in our case, the photos), with the possibility of choosing what we want to keep and what we don't. Obviously, if our intention is perform a full download, it will be enough to leave only the content of Google Photos marked.

Once this is done, Google offers us different export options: through a download link (the one we must choose to transfer them to the PC) or through a transfer to other storage platforms such as OneDrive or Dropbox. We can also select the frequency of the transfer (for example, so that it is done automatically every three months), as well as the size of the files to be transferred. The process may take more or less depending on the number of files to be exported, but it is one hundred percent secure.


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