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Comment by burgerzzz | Hacker News Reader

I've stopped using every Google product but Google search, and unfortunately Google Captcha, which I absolutely abhor. I downloaded Google Photos a few days ago to try and export some old photos and it refuses to let you view your old photos until you have give access to your current photos. That really typifies my experience with Google.

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Have you tried using Google Takeout? I have not but it claims it can export all of your photos/videos/etc. and is probably the sanctioned way to do this.

The iOS app needs photos access because it is less a Google Photos client and more an alternative Photos app with Google Photos syncing/integration. I think it would not be ideal to use it if all you want is to export data.

(Disclaimer: I currently work for Google.)

I exported all my Google photos with takeout recently. After around 70 hours I got a dump of 59 50GiB tgz files (format and size was my choice). I decided to have them sent to drive so I could sync them to a computer. It was a pretty pleasant experience, they even export metadata as json.

Unfortunately, at least in my experience with several different accounts, the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files. I try to infer, interpolate, and recover what I safely can during PhotoStructure imports of Takeout archives, but mostly it made me want to dig deeper into my storage closet to try to find the hard drives that had the actual, original files on them.

> the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files.

Are you talking about the inferred bit from other sources like phone location history? My experience may have been different because I paid Google for extra storage so that I could store the original versions of all my photos (For those that don't use Google Photos, Google offers "unlimited" lossily compressed photo storage but counts original quality photos against your drive quota.)

The json data is what they display in the UI, not a verbatim copy of the metadata, but the photos have the original metadata embedded in them.

At least for my Google Pixel, my "original quality" files from Takeout do not match the SHA of the original files pulled from the device. They kept the pixels, but they mucked with the EXIF headers.

I'm happy if your files weren't put through a blender!

> The iOS app needs photos access

Unfortunately that’s partly Apple to blame, as for the longest time it was an all or nothing permission, no option for write only access.

> Google Captcha

This one's scary from an infrastructure perspective. Way too many websites depend on Recaptcha, and an outage would be somewhat painful. There aren't tons of competitors, so with Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.

> There aren't tons of competitors,

Cloudflare, being the Internet security company that it is, I believe, should roll out its own captcha or equivalent solution, even if only for the traffic it fronts. They kind of have got all the tools in the bag to make a splash with such an offering.

Cloudflare's "bot management" is effectively their own solution but doesn't provide a way to affirm you're not a bot like other solutions do; think of it like a fraud detection service and not a captcha service.

I also find it unlikely that they move away from Google's recaptcha since they seem to have an unlimited, unrestricted (can be used for any domain) recaptcha API key that they heavily rely on for the "captcha" challenge website owners like to use.

Cloudflare isn't really any better than Google.

Really, they're worse. If Cloudflare decides you should not be, you're not allowed to use the internet at all. The last thing we need is to give them even more power.

There aren't tons of competitors, so with Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.

The real purpose of it is to get free human labour classifying images their ML can’t handle. Why are there so many asking you to find squares with cars, or pedestrian crossings do you think?

Also there is no easy way to export all your photos. I learned this the hard way when I decided to move my photos to iCloud. There used to be an option in Drive to link your Google Photos albums and download them, but they removed it. You can request your data from Google and then download a large ZIP, but I had numerous issues with it and it broke the Live photos from iPhone. In the end I had to manually select ~100-200 photos in the iOS Google Photos app and click Download and then do this for all photos (it will not let you select all at once, there is a limit). And then I enabled iCloud to back up the downloaded photos.

Probably an issue with them choosing the most general route. They most likely think most people using Takeout want photos they can open and move to other storage/photo services, so putting the converted png/jpg provides more compatibility than the 'heic' photos that are only supported by iCloud and a handful of other services.

I was going to suggest to use rclone to download everything, but it seems that they are a couple of limitations: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#downloading-images

Seems that using Google takeout is your best bet.

Downloading as zip files worked for me. It produced a bunch of zip files each of 1GB size.

> there is no easy way to export all your [Google Photos]

If you're in the EU, I'd love to see them try and hold your data hostage as of May 2018. Was this before that time / outside of the EU?

If you’re on iOS how would the app download a photo without write access to photos?

To be clear, the first requirement after opening the app is access to your Photos. I didn't even get far enough to view the old photos, let alone an attempt at an export.

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