How to download and then remove ALL photos in Google Photos
Summary
- Why I want to download all photos from Google Photos
- Download all photos from Google Photos
- Delete all photos from Google Photos to free up storage for Gmail
- Disable auto backup to Google Photos in iPhone
Background Story
I have used Gmail and Google Photes but someday I was told by a friend that he could not send anything to my Gmail. So I logined to my Gmail and was prompted that “You can’t send or receive emails because you’re out of storage space. Try freeing up space or purchase additional storage”.
It’s very wired since I actually have a monthly subscription of 100G while my total usage is 36.22G!
Also, even if I tried to pay, I ran into this:
OK, at that moment I was stuck. It seemed the only way to get myself out is to stop using Google Photos so that it won’t eat up my storage for Gmail which I really like and I need to cancel the subscription from Apple & Google.
So I need to figure out ways to:
- Download all photos from Google Photos
- Delete all photos from Google Photos to free up storage for Gmail
- Disable auto backup to Google Photos in iPhone
Download all photos from Google Photos
There is a good central place provided by Google to download your datat from every Google service you use (certainly Google Photos is included). It’s Google Takeout!
Just open above link and “Deselect all” and check “Google Photos” only since I don’t need to take out everything but just from Google Photos.
And then select frequency to “Export once” and use “.zip” as file type. One thing to note is the zip file size.
In the begining, I keep the default “2 GB” and since I have like 56 G photos even after zipping, it gives me 28 links to download! Although I’m a software developer, I cannot figure out a quick (and lazy) way to download them all! Definitely I don’t want to click all these links!
So I actually go back and create another export with “10G” as the size so that I end up with 6 links. Now it sounds better, right?
Delete all photos from Google Photos
After I download all photoes and open the zip files to double check they are not corrupted, my next challenge becomes how to delete all photos from Google Photos. At the end of the day, my purpose is to free up storage to bring back Gmail.
However, this can be crazy if you have a lot of photos in Google Photos. Its web page doesn’t provide a handy way to do that. I can either select photos one by one or by date which is a little more efficient. However, since I have years of photos stored in Google Photos, it will still be crazy!
And this is not just my challenge. Look at https://support.google.com/photos/thread/197868?hl=en, I see 100+ replies on the same ask. One of the replies mentions
As I tried, it worked like a charm!
The only 2 thing to note are:
- You can try to zoom out (to allow more images loaded in current webpage). The tool will help you to delete all images on current page and then reload the page. So the more images can be loaded in one page, the more it will delete in one batch. As long as your network speed and machine’s memory can afford, you can zoom out the page to the extreme (it doesn’t matter you can see the text on that zoom level or not).
- Sometimes during the deletion, it may tell you that “No more images to delete” while you still have many to go. At that moments, I just refresh the web page and re-run the tool (actually the javascript) in the console. Don’t just re-run it per instructions, refresh the page first.
Disable auto backup to Google Photos in iPhone
This could be the easiest step of the whole story. Just open Google Photos app in iPhone, click my avatar on upper right corner and then in prompted dialog, disable auto backup.
For me, there are some extra work to do:
- Cancel monthly subscription
- Ask for refund from Apple for previous subscription (wish me luck)
Sorry, I do like Google Photos and am willing to pay. However, somehow it doesn’t allow me :(
