How to Download All Your Google Photos to Your PC (2026)

There are three ways to download photos from Google Photos to a computer, and which one you want depends on how many photos you’re talking about. A handful: the website. An album: the website again. Everything: Google Takeout, and that’s where it gets long.

I did the everything version. The app said 12.5 GB; Takeout gave me 159 archives and 344 GB, and it took three days. So here’s the short path for each case, and what I wish I’d known for the big one.

A few photos: download from photos.google.com

1. Open photos.google.com on the computer.
2. Hover a photo and tick the circle in its corner. Click the next one, or hold Shift and click a later one to select everything in between.
3. Press Shift + D, or open the three-dot menu and choose Download.

One photo comes down as a file. Several come down as a single zip. You get the original, with the date and place inside the file if the camera put them there.

Fine for an afternoon’s worth of pictures. Selecting ten years by hand is not a plan.

A whole album: “Download all”

Open the album, click the three dots at the top right, Download all. Google zips the album and your browser saves it. One click per album.

Everything: Google Takeout

To download all of Google Photos at once, there’s Google Takeout.

1. Open the link: only Google Photos is selected.
2. Choose .zip and an archive size (1 GB to 50 GB).
3. Create export, and wait for Google’s email. Hours, or days for a big library.
4. Download every archive, then unzip them all into one folder.

That’s the whole method. In practice, for a big library:

• It’s much bigger than the app says. Photos uploaded in “High quality” before June 2021 don’t count toward your storage, but they’re all in the export. My 12.5 GB were 344 GB. Check you have the space, and use an external drive if the PC’s disk is small.
• Downloads break. In the browser, a download that dies starts again from zero. I tried 50 GB archives first; not one finished on my connection. With 2 GB archives more of them finished, but I ended up with 159 files and no idea which were whole. Pick the size by your connection: big archives on fiber, small ones on anything shaky.
• Keep track. The archives are numbered, -001.zip, -002.zip… Note which ones finished. A missing number is a missing archive, and an archive that’s a few KB instead of 2 GB didn’t really download.
• The dates are in the .json files. Next to almost every photo there’s a .json with the date taken and the place. Keep them. Tools like Google Photos Takeout Helper or immich-go read them.

Did everything arrive?

Takeout hides one count, in a file called archive_browser.html inside the last archive. Mine said 104,547 files. That counts files, not photos: the .json files and the copy of each photo in every album folder are in it too. It tells you what Google put in the export; comparing it with what’s on your disk is up to you.

That was the part that bothered me most. The whole story is here.

So how do you get 300 GB down without losing your mind?

Takeout makes the archives. Getting them onto your disk is up to you, and these are the ways I’ve seen people do it, in my thread and since.

1. The browser, one archive at a time. Fine if your connection never drops. Mine did, and every dropped download started again from zero.
2. A download manager or a curl script. What I ended up doing. Downloads resume, which fixes the worst of it. You still keep the list of what finished yourself, and at the end nothing tells you the copy is complete.
3. Takeout to Google Drive, then rclone or your NAS’s Drive sync. The cleanest answer in my thread: resumable, with checksums. The catch is Drive space as big as the export, which for most people means paying Google for a bigger plan to hold a second copy.
4. A browser extension like Snapback. Skips Takeout and walks photos.google.com one photo at a time. Free, quick to start. Closed source, it breaks when Google changes the website, and the dates stay in separate .json files unless you buy the same company’s fixer.
5. Homewend. The one I built after those three days. You sign in to Google once and press one button. It asks Takeout for the export, waits for it, downloads every archive straight to your disk and picks up where a broken download stopped. Then it checks every file against the list of what Google put in the export, and tells you if something didn’t arrive. Your photos land in plain folders, by year and month, untouched.

What it can’t do: make Google prepare the export any faster (still hours or days), or tell you about photos Google left out of the export. Nobody outside Google can. It’s free and open source; leave your email below and I’ll send you the link when it’s out.

FAQ

Can I download all my Google Photos at once? Yes, with Google Takeout. The website only downloads what you select, or one album at a time.

Does downloading delete the photos from Google Photos? No. You get a copy; nothing changes in your account.

Is there a Google Photos app for Windows that downloads everything? No. Google’s desktop apps upload to Google Photos, they don’t bring the library down.

Why is the download so much bigger than my storage? Photos uploaded in “High quality” before June 2021 don’t count toward your storage, but Takeout includes them.