Google Photos Takeout horror story: +300 GB in 159 archives, dead downloads, sleepless nights

I wanted my Google Photos on my NAS. Ten years of the kids and the family, in normal folders, on a disk I own. That’s all.

It took three days and a sleepless night, and at the end I still didn’t know if I had everything. I wrote it up on r/DataHoarder as a horror story. 95 people answered. This page is what happened and what they told me.

12.5 GB, said the app

First I checked how much I had to download. The Google Photos app said 12.5 GB. That was the only number it gave me. How many photos, how many videos: nowhere.

I asked Takeout for the export. A few hours later it came back as 159 archives of 2 GB each. Over 300 GB.

Later I found out why. Anything uploaded in “High quality” before June 2021 doesn’t count against your storage, ever. So the number the app shows you isn’t your library. It’s what you pay for.

159 downloads

In the browser, a download that dies halfway starts again from zero. Three at a time: I’d come back an hour later and two had failed. Or one. Or none. No pattern.

After a while I had no idea where I was. Which archives were whole, which were half, which had failed. Just a downloads folder with 159 files that could be anything.

A lot of people in the thread said: why 2 GB, pick 50 GB. I had tried. Every single 50 GB download died after a few hours. No fiber where I live. Small archives were the only way anything finished.

So I did what a terminal person does. Resumable downloads with curl, a script to feed it the links, a couple of false starts. After three days the 159 zips were on the NAS.

Is it all there?

This is the part I didn’t expect. I had the files, and I couldn’t answer the simplest question: did everything arrive?

There’s no rsync at the end that tells you the copy matches. The only count I found was a file called archive_browser.html, hidden in the last archive. It said 104,547 files. I thought that was my photo count. It isn’t: u/shoonmcgregor pointed out that it counts the .json files next to every photo, and the same photo repeated in every album folder.

So I did the only thing that felt safe. I kept paying Google. Until I’m sure I have everything, I’m not touching anything over there.

What 95 people told me

I asked three questions: how do you track which archives arrived, how do you check nothing is missing, and can you know how many photos an account holds before exporting. Here’s what came back.

It works if your connection holds. The top answer, from u/TheNyanCatz: 50 GB archives every six months, about a terabyte each time, straight into Immich with immich-go, “I dont touch them manually ever.” That’s a good setup. It needs a line that can pull 50 GB without dropping.

Some people are doing it by hand, for months. u/bahyumbug has 12 years and 500 GB. The method: sort everything into monthly albums, export six albums at a time, fix the dates with GPTH Neo, spot-check, move to network storage, burn to Blu-ray. A quarter of the way through. And: “I find missing chunks in every download batch.”

The workaround costs more Google. u/Baxter-Stabbington sends Takeout to Google Drive and pulls it down with rclone. It’s the cleanest answer in the thread, and it’s seamless, as long as you have Drive space as big as the export. At 300 GB that meant a bigger plan. Paying Google more in order to have a copy of what you already pay Google to keep.

Nobody could answer the second question. u/Sopel97 put it most honestly: if you don’t keep your own list, “you have to trust google.” The closest thing to a count before exporting is the Google Dashboard, which u/shoonmcgregor pointed me to. Mine said about 30,000. Better than nothing, not a number you can check a copy against.

And it isn’t only Google. u/Eclectika is getting photos out of Amazon Photos, where you select one photo at a time: “I’m not even half way through and am losing the will to live.”

So I built the thing I wanted that week

Reading those answers, the pattern was plain. Everyone who gets through this does it with something homemade: a curl loop, a spreadsheet of archive numbers, a bigger Drive plan, months of monthly albums. Nobody had the boring tool in the middle. So I wrote it, and called it Homewend.

Here’s what it does with my three questions.

Which archives arrived? It keeps that list for you. You sign in to Google once and press one button. It asks Takeout for the export, waits for it, and downloads every archive straight to your disk. A download that dies picks up where it stopped, not from zero, and 2 GB or 50 GB stops mattering.

Is anything missing? It reads the list Google puts inside the export and checks every file on your disk against it, and tells you which ones didn’t arrive. That’s the rsync at the end I didn’t have.

How many photos before exporting? It can’t tell you that, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Nobody outside Google can. What it can say is that everything Google put in the export is on your disk.

The photos end up in plain folders, by year and month, never edited. It’s free and open source. If you want it, leave your email below and I’ll send you the link when it’s out. The longer version of why: Why I built Homewend.

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The original thread, with every answer: Google Photos Takeout horror story on r/DataHoarder.