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Google Takeout for Google Photos: What You Actually Get (2026)

How to export Google Photos with Google Takeout, how long it takes, which archive size to pick, and what's inside the zips: folders, .json files and duplicates.

Updated

Google Takeout is how you export your whole Google Photos library. It’s free, it’s official, and it gives you everything: originals, albums, and the information about each photo. It’s also slow, and what comes out isn’t a tidy photo folder. Here’s how to run it, and what to expect at each step, from someone who exported a 344 GB library with it.

How to export Google Photos with Takeout

  1. Go to takeout.google.com with only Google Photos selected. “All photo albums included” is the default: leave it, unless you want only some albums.
  2. Destination: “Send download link via email” to download it yourself. You can also send it to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box.
  3. Frequency: “Export once”, or “every 2 months for 1 year” for a backup that updates itself (more below).
  4. File type: .zip for Windows and Mac, .tgz if you’re on Linux.
  5. File size: from 1 GB to 50 GB. More on this below.
  6. Create export.

How long does Google Takeout take for photos?

Hours to days, depending on the size of the library. Google emails you when it’s ready; there’s nothing to do until then. Mine, 344 GB, took a few hours. Big libraries can take days.

Which archive size?

This is the decision that matters, and it depends on your connection, not on your library.

  • 50 GB: few files. Great on fiber. On a slow or unstable line, one dropped connection means that whole archive starts again. On mine, not one 50 GB download finished.
  • 2 GB: many files (I got 159), but a failure costs little. Better on a shaky connection, and more to keep track of.

Why is the export bigger than my storage?

Because anything uploaded in “High quality” before June 2021 doesn’t count toward your storage, but it’s all in the export. My app said 12.5 GB; the export was 344 GB. Check your disk space before you start downloading.

What’s inside the zips

Every archive opens into Takeout/Google Photos/. Put them all together and you get:

  • “Photos from 2019”, “Photos from 2020”…: every photo, by year.
  • One folder per album, with its photos in it. The same photo is also in its year folder, so there are duplicates. That’s normal.
  • A .json file next to almost every photo, with the date it was taken, the location, the description. Many photos have that inside the file too, not all. Keep the .json files: tools like Google Photos Takeout Helper or immich-go use them to put the dates back.
  • archive_browser.html, in the last archive: a list of what Google put in the export. Mine said 104,547 files; that’s files, .json included, not photos.

Takeout doesn’t delete anything from Google Photos. It’s a copy.

Scheduled exports: Takeout as a backup

Since June 2026, the “every 2 months for 1 year” option works incrementally for Google Photos: the first export is complete, each one after contains only what’s new or edited. Google was still rolling it out, so it may not show in every account yet. Each time, it’s a new email and new archives to download.

Where it gets hard

Takeout is the easy part. Downloading a hundred archives without losing track, and then knowing whether everything arrived, is where I spent three days. That’s the story.

There are a few ways through that part. A download manager resumes broken downloads, but leaves you counting files. Sending the export to Google Drive and pulling it down with rclone works well, if you have Drive space as big as the export. Or Homewend, which I built for exactly this: you sign in once and press one button, and it asks Takeout for the export, downloads every archive with resume, and checks each file against what Google exported. It can’t speed up Google’s queue, and it can’t see photos Google left out of the export. What is in the export, it checks file by file.

For the whole route to a disk you own, see backing up Google Photos to an external hard drive.

FAQ

Does Google Takeout include all photos? It includes everything in your Google Photos library that you selected. It can’t tell you if anything is missing, and Google doesn’t publish a count of your library you could compare against.

Does Google Takeout keep the metadata? Yes, in the .json file next to each photo, and in the photo itself when the camera wrote it there.

Can I use Takeout for just one album? Yes: click “All photo albums included” and pick the albums you want.

Is Google Takeout free? Yes.