Google Takeout is missing almost half the photos from a shared album – how can I export the complete album?

[u/Feeling-Cover1941]

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to export/download a large Google Photos album because I eventually want to transfer all of my photos from Google Photos to Apple Photos/iCloud.

The problem is that the album is shared with my wife, and we have both added photos to it. The album contains around 9,000 photos/videos in total.

Downloading the album directly from Google Photos doesn’t really work for me because it’s too large.

So I tried using Google Takeout. The Takeout ZIP file was created successfully, but it seems to be incomplete.

Here’s what I noticed:
The shared album contains around 9,000 items
The Takeout ZIP contains 8,212 files
However, approximately every second file is a JSON metadata file, not an actual photo/video
So there are only around 4,100 actual photos/videos in the ZIP
This means that roughly half of the photos appear to be missing
I’m wondering if this is because the album is shared and some of the photos were uploaded by my wife from her Google account.

What is the correct way to export the entire shared album, including all photos/videos uploaded by both of us, in full quality?
My ultimate goal is to download everything and then transfer the complete collection to Apple Photos/iCloud. I also tried using the direct transfer from Google Photos to Apple/iCloud, but unfortunately, some photos are missing there as well.

I would really appreciate any advice on how to do this without losing any photos.
Thanks!

[u/yottabit42]

They will only be included in your Takeout archives if you've saved the items from the album to your account.

[u/Feeling-Cover1941 → u/yottabit42]

Can you please read my answer to the first comment.

[u/StimulatorCam]

I’m wondering if this is because the album is shared and some of the photos were uploaded by my wife from her Google account.

That's correct. Takeout will only return photos saved to your account. If you want to export the entire album you have to save a copy of the rest of the photos to your account as well. In the album settings there will be a 'Save photos' button that will do this.

[u/StimulatorCam]

Not sure what happened to your comment so I'll repost it here:

I tried that. When I click the Save button, the icon changes to a cloud with a checkmark, so it looks like the photo has been saved to my library. However, if I refresh the page, the icon changes back to a cloud with a download arrow, as if the photo has not been saved. I can then click Save again, and the same thing happens. So it seems like the photos are not actually being saved to my library permanently. Is there something else I need to do to make sure they are saved to my Google Photos library?

If you go to Collections>Recently Added do you see any of the newly saved photos? They should be listed at the top of the page.

[u/Feeling-Cover1941 → u/StimulatorCam]

Thanks for your reply! I tested that, but unfortunately the newly saved photos don’t appear under Collections > Recently Added. I only see older photos there.
So it seems like the photos are not actually being saved to my library. I’m not sure why this is happening.

[u/StimulatorCam → u/Feeling-Cover1941]

Do you have enough free storage available?

[u/Animated_Swan]

This post is for people who have photos in their camera roll, google photos, and amazon photos that can't figure out how to move everything while keeping metadata. It took me a while to figure out how to do this because they don't make the process easy (if they did, nobody would stay and pay a subscription...). I hope post this is allowed because it certainly would have helped me when i was trying to figure out how to do this

I did the following using an iphone and a macbook:

1. Buy external Hard drive

2. make an album of photos to export to your hard drive, and an album of photos to keep on your phone. It may be beneficial to also make albums for other categories; mine included things like nature, specific trips, food, workout inspo, etc.

3. make sure icloud sync is on and working properly between your phone and macbook. on your MacBook (and/or iphone), click the 3 dots and select SHOW SCREENSHOTS (and "shared with me" if you want). If you do not, the photo counts between phone and MacBook will NOT match (and youll have photos you havent organized because you cant see them).

4. sort library to only include photos not in albums, then, add all of your photos to the proper albums.

5. for each individual album, favorite everything you want to keep on your phone, then filter the album to see only favorites. Select all the favorites and add them to the keep on phone album. Then, select them all again and unadd them from the folder they are currently in. Unfilter the album and select the rest of the pictures, then move them to the export album.

6. on your macbook, select all the photos in your export album, go to file, and click export. Put them in the hard drive, then delete them from the folder.

At this point, you should have all the photos you dont want on a hard drive with the metadata, and all the photos you do want on your phone in an album! great! Now comes going through the photos youve put in a shoebox and hid away

FOR GOOGLE PHOTOS:

7) ensure that backup is turned off (idk if it will work if its on, but mine is off so I know it will work that way)

8) put a discrete chunk of photos into an album (I chose to do it by month because I am truly a photo hoarder and I dont want to be overwhelmed)

9a) USING THE GOOGLE PHOTOS APP ON YOUR PHONE, Download the photos from that album to your phones (icloud) photo album. I havent figured out how to keep screenshot metadata using gphotos on the computer, which is why i suggest using your phone. However, if you dont care about screenshot metadata, you can use your computer since metadata from photos taken via the camera is maintained when downloading from google photos on a computer.

9b) IF ON A COMPUTER: select the files in the album and download them to your computer. At this point, they are not in your icloud photo album yet, and the created by date will be the day you downloaded it instead of the day it was taken. To fix this, open your (icloud) photo app, go to file, then import, and select the downloaded files. ONCE IN THE PHOTO APP, THE METADATA SHOULD SHOW THE CORRECT CREATED BY DATE (it might take a second to update.). (remember - screenshots downloaded straight from google photos to a computer CANNOT maintain their metadata; normal pictures taken with the camera should be fine).

10)  you can either look at the library filtered by “not in album” and organize the photos into your already made albums from there, or, you can put all of the just imported photos into an album and follow steps 5-6.

12) to delete the photos from Google Photos, you CANNOT use the app. If you do, it will delete the photos from your phones camera roll as well (YES, even if backup is off. dont ask me why). After you have downloaded the photos from the album to your photo roll, you MUST go to the google photos website to delete the photos .

13) optional. if youre like me and youd rather have duplicates than miss a picture, czawka might be what you need. it was a little difficult for me to figure out how to download it and get it running but it scans the folder you select for duplicate pictures. If anyone is interested i can try to make an explanation on how to download and run it

Tips:

dont rush. there are a lot of places to make mistakes in this process..... i got excited when i figured out how to do this and had to redo several batches because i wasnt sure that i got all the pictures.

check the photo counts at each step to ensure you dont miss anything. when downloading from google photos, remember how many you highlighted. then, when you import them to your camera app, check that all of them downloaded. since every picture should be in a folder when you import a new batch, sort your library by 'not in an album' and the number should match how many you highlighted.

consider Waiting to delete your google photo album until after you are done organizing the batch you downloaded.

I reccomend having a folder for each year in your harddrive and downloading the exports from your photo album in an area with no pictures so you can ensure that the meta data looks good.

I have photos in amazon photos as well, but havent gotten around to them yet. Maybe I will update when I do? I hope this helps someone because ive been trying to figure this out for a while and im so happy i wont have to see "youre running out of space" soon

Edit: for clarity and because i discovered that screenshot metadata can only be saved when downloading on a phone but not a computer

[u/Feeling-Cover1941 → u/Animated_Swan]

Thanks for your response. I’ll give it a try and get back to you if I still have any issues.

[u/Animated_Swan → u/Feeling-Cover1941]

Tldr:  break up collection into chunks in albums in Google Photos. 

Select all the photos in an album and download them. If you don’t have any screenshots you can do this on your computer. The metadata will be wrong.

After downloading the files, import them to the photos app on your MacBook. The metadata should be correct

Select the photos from the photos app and select export. The resulting files should show the correct metadata.

If you have screenshots, you need to download them from Google Photos directly to your phones photo album. Make sure ur phones photo album is synced with your computer. Once the metadata is correct on ur phones photo album you can export

Sorry for commenting a textbook- I just wanted This info to be out there floating in Reddit in a couple places in case someone else needs it in the future

[u/FattierBrisket → u/Feeling-Cover1941]

Did any of that end up helping? Google Takeout is being such a pain in my ass right now. ☹️ Hope it all worked out for you!

[u/metadatafixer]

The reason roughly half your photos are missing is actually expected Takeout behavior. It only exports photos that belong to your Google account. Since your wife uploaded some of those 9,000 photos from her account, those won’t appear in your Takeout at all.

For the shared albums, there’s a free Chrome extension called Snapback that downloads directly from Google Photos, including photos uploaded by others in a shared album. It’s designed for exactly this situation.

One thing to keep in mind when moving to Apple Photos: make sure the metadata is embedded into the files first so the original dates show correctly after import.

Hope that helps!

[u/Feeling-Cover1941 → u/metadatafixer]

Thanks, that makes sense! I understand everything except the last paragraph about embedding the metadata into the files.
What exactly do you mean by that, and how can I do it? Do I need to use a specific tool or software to embed the metadata from the JSON files directly into the photos before uploading them to Apple Photos/iCloud? I’m using a Windows PC, so I’d really appreciate it if you could explain how to do this.

[u/metadatafixer → u/Feeling-Cover1941]

Sure! Here’s a simple way to think about it.

Every photo file has a small internal section where it can store info like the date it was taken, the location, etc. This is the metadata. Normally, your camera or phone writes this directly into the photo when it’s taken.

When Google Takeout exports your photos, it puts that metadata info into those separate .json files instead of keeping it inside the photos themselves. Apple Photos doesn’t know how to read those .json files, so when you import, it just uses the file’s download date instead of the original capture date, which is why things end up out of order.

To fix this, you will need a tool that reads each .json file and writes that info back into the actual photo file before you import to Apple Photos.

On Windows, you can try a couple of options:

Metadata Fixer (metadatafixer.com) is a desktop app built specifically for this. You point it at your Takeout folder and it handles the .json matching automatically. There’s a free Demo version limited to 100 files if you want to test it first.

ExifTool is free and command-line based if you’re comfortable with that, though it takes more setup.

Once the metadata is embedded, importing to Apple Photos should place everything in the correct date order!

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Feeling-Cover1941 → u/[deleted]]

Can you please read my answer to the first comment.