Does rclone Still Work with Google Photos? (2026)

rclone is a great tool, and for years it was the way to back up Google Photos. In March 2025 Google changed the rules: rclone still works with Google Photos, but it can no longer download your whole library, only the photos it uploaded itself. Here are the alternatives that still get your photos out, then what rclone can still do, including a way to back up everything with rclone anyway.

The alternatives

• Google Takeout. Google’s official export of your whole library, as zip archives you download yourself.
• Takeout to Google Drive, then rclone. Keep using rclone: Takeout puts the archives in your Drive, rclone pulls them down. Details below.
• Snapback. A free Chrome extension that downloads your photos straight from photos.google.com, no Takeout. Closed source; dates and places stay in separate .json files unless you buy the same company’s Metadata Fixer.
• Homewend. An open-source Google Photos downloader: your whole library through Takeout, straight to your disk, checked file by file.

What rclone can still do with Google Photos

Set it up. Run rclone config, create a new remote, pick google photos as the storage type and log in with your browser. rclone recommends creating your own OAuth client ID. If rclone stopped working after an update, run rclone config reconnect gphotos: (with your remote’s name).

Upload. This still works in full:

rclone copy ~/Pictures/2026 gphotos:upload          # into your library
rclone mkdir gphotos:album/Holidays
rclone copy ~/Pictures/holidays gphotos:album/Holidays   # into an album

rclone can only add photos to albums it created itself, and uploads count toward your Google storage.

Download what rclone uploaded. rclone copy gphotos:media/by-year ~/backup still runs, but it only finds the photos rclone put there. Through the API, photos come down without the location in the EXIF and not at full resolution, and videos come heavily compressed. The rclone author’s gphotosdl fixes the quality: run gphotosdl -login, then gphotosdl, then add --gphotos-proxy "http://localhost:8282" to your rclone command. It doesn’t change which photos rclone can see.

Back up your whole library with rclone, through Google Drive

rclone can’t read Google Photos, but it reads Google Drive perfectly, and Google Takeout can deliver your photos to Drive.

1. In Takeout, select only Google Photos and choose Add to Drive as the delivery method. The archives land in a Takeout folder in your Drive.
2. Set up a Drive remote: rclone config, storage type drive.
3. Pull the archives down, resumable and with checksums:

rclone copy gdrive:Takeout /mnt/backup/takeout --progress

4. Unzip them, and delete them from Drive to free the space.

It works well. The catch is the space: you need free Drive space as big as the export, until the copy is done. For a large library that means a bigger Google plan, paid to hold a second copy of what Google already stores.

Why Homewend is simpler

Homewend uses the same Takeout export and skips the Drive step: you sign in and press one button, it asks Takeout for the export and downloads every archive straight to your disk, so there’s no extra Google storage to pay for and no rclone config to maintain. It picks up where a broken download stopped, keeps the list of what arrived, and checks every file against what Google exported, which neither rclone nor a browser download does for you. Your photos land in plain folders, by year and month. Free and open source, for Mac, Windows and Linux.