how to download all your photos from google photos, and keep their dates.

for a lot of families, google photos quietly became the place where everything went. every phone backed up to it, year after year, and it was easy to stop thinking about it. that's a good thing, right up until you want all of it somewhere else: on a drive at home, next to the photos from an old camera, or simply as a second copy you control.

selecting photos in the app and pressing download works for a handful. for ten or fifteen years of them, the tool built for the job is google takeout. it's free, it comes from google, and it gives you everything in one go. it just helps to know what you'll get before you start.

before you start

• check how much there is. in google photos or your google account storage page, look at how much space your photos use. that's roughly how much you'll be downloading.
• make room for twice that. takeout arrives as compressed files you'll need to unpack, so for a while you'll have both the download and the unpacked photos. an external drive is often the easiest place for both.
• one folder for this export. name it plainly, like google photos, october 2026. everything from takeout goes in there, untouched.

and one reassurance: downloading your photos doesn't remove them from google photos. nothing changes in your account. you're only making a copy.

step 1: ask google takeout for your photos

go to takeout.google.com and sign in with the account that holds your photos. takeout lists every google product with your data in it, all ticked. press deselect all, then scroll down and tick only google photos. this keeps the export to just what you want.

under google photos you'll see a button for which albums to include. leave it on all of them for a full copy. if more than one person in the family has a google account, each one needs their own export.

step 2: choose how it arrives

press next step and takeout asks a few questions:

• delivery. the simplest choice is a download link sent by email. takeout can also put the files into google drive, dropbox, microsoft onedrive or box, but if the goal is a copy on your own drive, the email link is the most direct.
• frequency. choose to export once. there's also an option to repeat the export every two months for a year, which is handy later, but one clean copy comes first.
• file type. choose .zip. google notes it opens on almost any computer, while .tgz may need extra software, especially on windows.
• file size. a large library gets split into several files. picking the largest size means fewer pieces to download, but each piece takes longer. a middle size is a fine choice on a slower connection.

press create export. google says this can take from a few minutes to a few days, though most people get their link the same day. you can close the page; the email will come when it's ready.

step 3: download every part, within a week

when the email arrives, the export may be one file or many, named part 1, part 2 and so on. download every one into your folder. two things to know:

• the link doesn't last. google says each export expires after about seven days, and each file can be downloaded up to five times. if time runs out, you can simply ask for a new export.
• count the parts. the takeout page lists how many files the export has. make sure you have every one before you unpack anything. a missing part means missing photos.

step 4: unpack it, and keep the .json files

open each .zip file into the same folder. inside, you'll find a folder for google photos with folders named by year, like photos from 2014, plus a folder for each of your albums.

next to many photos you'll also see a small file with the same name ending in .json. it's tempting to delete these. please don't. each one holds details google kept about that photo, including when it was taken, and sometimes where and any description you added. for photos whose own date was lost along the way, like pictures saved from a message or a scan, that .json file may be the only record of the date left.

step 5: don't worry about the doubles

as you look around, you'll notice some photos appear more than once. that's expected. a photo that's in an album usually shows up both in its album folder and in its year folder. you may also see an edited version next to the original.

resist the urge to clean this up now. deleting by hand across thousands of files is where good photos get lost. keep everything for now, and sort out doubles later, once everything sits in one place.

step 6: check the copy before you trust it

• scroll to the ends. open the oldest year folder and the newest. if both ends of your library are there, that's a good sign.
• open a handful. pick photos from different years and make sure they open. play a few videos all the way through.
• remember the quality setting. if your photos were backed up in storage saver (once called high quality), takeout gives you the copies google kept, which were made smaller. the originals may still be on an old phone or computer, so it's worth keeping those too.

then make a second copy somewhere else, so your photos live in two healthy places, not one.

then put it all in order

google photos is usually one part of the picture. the years before it may be on old phones in a drawer or an old hard drive in the closet. once each source has its own folder, how to organize old digital photos, by when they happened walks through bringing them together.

where treasure box fits

treasure box is the private life archive we're building for exactly this moment, when photos from google, old phones and old drives finally come together. you bring them in from your browser, it reads the date each one was taken, and it lays them out on one private timeline, so 2014 sits next to 2014 no matter which service or drawer it came from. it tells you when your files are safely stored, and you can take a full copy out anytime.

if that sounds like a good home for your photos, see how treasure box works or read our privacy promises.

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