Here's how to download all your photos and videos from Google at once

Whether you’re prompted to make more room on your Google account after seeing the dreaded “You’re out of storage” message, want to back up all your images, or looking to migrate to another cloud storage service, knowing how to batch download all your photos and videos from Google is a useful trick to know.

Unfortunately, it’s not entirely obvious how to download all your photos from Google Photos in one go – but we want to show you how!

Here we’re looking at how to download multiple photos or videos from Google Photos and how to download everything from Google Photos, straight to your PC hard drive.

How to download multiple photos from Google Photos

This is the simpler task of the two, and the process is the same whether you’re downloading photos or videos from Google Photos.

First head to Google Photos and click on the photos or videos you want to download.
Click on the three dots at the top right and click Download (or use Shift + D).
Your download should begin.

Here’s how to stop automatically backing photos to Google Photos. We’re separately looking at what to do with Google Photos once free storage ends on 21, June 2021.

How to download all Google Photos at once to PC or hard drive

Downloading all your photos from Google Drive is a lot less straightforward. If you tried to download all your images using the method above, you’d have noticed there’s no way to batch download everything directly within Google Phones (we don’t know why either). Instead, you’ll have to head to Google Takeout.

Google Takeout lets you download any data from your Google account – whether that’s your Chrome history, Google Play activity, Google Play Books, your Hangouts history, or all your Google Photos. You can download it via Google Takeout.

Head to Google Takeout and click Deselect all – this ensures you’re not downloading your entire Google history

Scroll down the list and select Google Photos.
Click on “All photo albums included” to download only specific albums from Google Photos.

If you haven’t separated all your pictures into albums (because who has time for that?), Google will automatically separate them by year.

Once you’re happy with the selections, scroll to the bottom and select Next Step.

In the export settings that follow, you can choose how often you want to download all your Google Photo content.

You can also specify whether you want the final exported zipped file to be emailed to you, or sent to another cloud storage option. We’ll stick to an email link in this case.

Also see: Best cloud storage services of the year

At this stage, you can also select how large you want each exported zip file to be. The default setting is 2GB, and the maximum size is 50GB. Keep in mind, exports larger than 2GB will be compressed in zip64 files. Google warns this may not be supported by older systems, so you may need additional file compression software to unzip your exports. Click Create Export when you’re ready.

Your files will now begin exporting. You may need to wait a few minutes depending on how large your whole collection is. You can also choose to cancel at this point.

Once the export is complete, you’ll be able to download your photos by clicking on Show Exports.

You can now download each exported zip folder to your hard drive. Keep in mind: the download links expire after one week.

If you opted for an email notification, you can also download the exports directly from the email.

Also note, you should get a security authorization email from Google to confirm it’s you requesting to export your photos and not someone else. You may need to authorize it before you’re able to download the your photos and videos.