Inspired by the NYTimes story[1] of the past few days of several families that were locked out of their Google accounts forever I decided to try syncing my photo library from Google Photos to S3 using rclone, but it turns out Google Photos does not support getting your original quality photos back OUT. The only way is through the manual and laborious "takeout" process.<p>[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
Wait really? I can't download my original file? Is there official docs on this, I couldn't find it on google. Instead I had to find it on here:<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/22440156/google-photos-download-save" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/22440156/google-photos-download-sav...</a><p>> Now you get to choose from a variety of different options: Whether you want your data to be emailed to you as an attachment or sent to Drive, OneNote, Dropbox, or Box;<p>So does this mean I'll need DOUBLE the storage space in my google cloud just to download my photos in original quality?<p>What kind of horrible dark pattern is this... We need to raise hell on this issue, it's so ridiculous.
I have no love for Google, but Takeout is very easy. Check a checkbox, receive a tar/zip file and you have your originals. Not really a laborious process, unless they changes it last week or so.
I wanted to back my google photos to my NAS the same way I do with Google Drive. And according to Synology this is not possible.<p>Yes Google Takeout exists, but I want recurring automated backup and not links sent through email. Yes I can script my way around it, but I shouldn't have to.
If you’re an european user you can ask for a complete dump of your data according to gdpr, and if they don’t give back __your__ data (the originals) you can bring them to court.<p>It’s nice to be european.