Why I built Homewend

I wanted my Google Photos on my NAS. It took three days, 159 archives and a sleepless night, and at the end I still couldn’t tell if everything had arrived. I wrote it up on r/DataHoarder and 95 people answered: the whole story is here.

Reading their answers, the pattern was clear. The people who got their photos out had a fast line, or a spare terabyte of Google Drive, or months of patience, or a terminal and a free weekend. Everyone else was stuck, or still paying.

None of those things should be the price of a copy of your own photos.

So I built the tool I wanted on day one:

• It does the downloading. You ask Takeout for the export in your own browser, once. The app waits for it, downloads every archive, and resumes where a download broke. On a slow line it takes as long as it takes, without you watching it.
• It keeps the list. Every archive: arrived, partial, or failed. No more folder of 159 files that could be anything.
• It checks. Everything Google put in the export is compared, file by file, with what’s on your disk, and what’s missing has a name, not just a count. It can’t tell you what’s in your account but not in the export. Nobody outside Google can, and I’d rather say so than pretend.
• It leaves plain folders. Photos by year and album, the files exactly as Google gave them, readable without Homewend. If the app disappears tomorrow, your photos are still just photos on a disk.

It’s open source, and getting your photos home with it is free. You don’t have to leave Google. A second copy, on a disk you own, is the whole point.