Takeout doesn't work in practice for bigger collections (archive creation routinely fails, timeouts while downloading, 50GB max size results in many splits)

I've used this 3rd party tool and it worked OK: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/

I forgot to mention this. But yes the export failed several dozen times. I believe I ended up doing in chunks. It was hard to get them off

What worked for me:

- Use the .tgz option, not .zip

- I had to manually create several large albums by year, and then created a takeout archive with just that album. Then created another archive with the next album, ... You may not need to do this, try the whole enchilada first. My wife's photo takeout didn't require this, for example.

- I had to pick smaller archive sizes. 8gb worked for me. Yes, it was a lot of chunks.

- I had to switch to Chrome (not Firefox, which is my daily driver) before the download would complete successfully.

- Downloading to my NAS directly made it fail. Had to use local disk.

- wired, not wifi

Even with all these in place, my ISP sometimes didn't allow downloads to finish successfully. I had to run them early in the morning over several days.

I had to go through and redo several chunks that corrupted themselves somehow. Verify the chunks with `gunzip -t`

Also: now that you've got your photos and videos back, you might be interested in PhotoStructure! Details are in my profile. I'm providing free access to the beta in exchange for feedback.

That is scary, I migrated off of Google Photos before the integration with Google Drive was removed, but I was only ever comfortable using it knowing that as I snap photos they were being downloaded to a hard drive at my house.

I switched over to OneDrive and thankfully it still works that way.

Google Takeout is one of the features that improved dramatically ... over the course of the G+ shutdown.

Though it only became usable in the final month or two before the actual sunset.

If you're having issues, do follow up with Google tech support, it's among the few components that actually gets bugfixes.

Google Takeout works fine for that. It zips and splits everything in chunks. Didn't have any issue extracting 57GB worth of photos a gew months back.

you can divide it into pieces and just download them until it works. Did you try chunks, how many, what size?