How to Download Google Photos to Hard Drive | 3 Ways

Quick Search:

• Can I Download Google Photos to My Computer Hard Drive?
• Why Download Google Photos to Hard Drive?
• How to Download and Move Google Photos to Hard Drive?
• Conclusion

Can I Back up All My Google Photos to External Hard Drive?

Why Download Google Photos to Hard Drive?

Released in 2015, Google Photos has been the first choice for most users to save, organize, and share precious images and videos. Previously, Google Photos offered an unlimited storage space for compressed photos, which has attracted millions of users worldwide. Although this policy is ended now, Google Photos is always one of the most popular and useful photo storage service in the market.

However, it’s not secure enough to store your precious pictures and videos in only one place. And sometimes Google Photos doesn’t work well. For example, many users have encountered the problems like “Google Photos not syncing”, “Google Photos lost photos”, etc. Then, can you transfer Google Photos to an external hard drive? Yes! You can do so since there are many merits:

How to Download and Move Google Photos to Hard Drive?

No matter what kind of hard drive you want to backup, you need to download data from Google Photos at first. Then you can move the data to your hard drive. Anyway, there are 3 methods to help you back up photos and videos from Google Photos to hard drive. After reading, you can choose the one that’s convenient for you.

1️⃣Manually Download from Google Photos Website

2️⃣Batch Download from Google Takeout

3️⃣Using Third-Party Service-Multcloud

1:  How to Download Google Photos via Google Photos Website

If you only have a few photos and videos on Google Photos to backup, you can directly go to your Google Photos on the web, and download the images and/or videos to your local computer. Then you can choose to move the data to any type of the hard drive by dragging and dropping.

Step 1: Log into your Google Photos: Open any browser and visit https://photos.google.com/. Sign in to your Google Photos account and select the photos and/or videos you decide to backup.

Step 2: Download photos manually: Hit the 3-verical-dots icon to select the Download button. Then those files will be downloaded to your local computer.

If you only want to download Google Photos to local hard drive, you will need to perform the 2 steps above. But how to backup Google Photos to external hard drive? Then you need to connect your external hard drive to your computer. Then, drag and drop what you’ve downloaded to the external hard drive. Alternatively, you can directly choose the external hard drive as the destination during the downloading process.

2: How to Transfer Photos from Google Photos to External Hard Drive via Google Takeout

How do I backup my entire Google Photos if I have a large amount of data from Google Photos? Select photos one by one to download? That's too time-consuming! You can take advantage of Google Takeout. It is a data retrieval application that can help export data from Google devices at once, including exporting all Google Photos in one time instead of one by one. Read below to learn how do I export all photos out of Google Photos:

Step 1: Go to Google Takeout

• Log in to your Google Gmail account using your email and password. Click on your Profile Icon, then select "Manage your Google Account."
• Navigate to the "Data & Privacy" tab, and click "Download your Data" to access the Google Takeout on the web.

Step 2: Choose Google Photos and Create Export

• In the Google Takeout window, first click on  "Deselect All" to uncheck all the items and then specifically select "Google Photos." Click "Next" on the bottom.
• Then, choose the file type you want the exported data to be. And then choose the export frequency, destination respectively and delivery method (here we choose "Send download link via email"). Next, press the Create export tab on the right lower side.

Step 3: Wait for the email including Google Photos download link

After a period of time, you will receive an email with a hyperlink to download the files. The waiting time for the email depends on the file size, from seconds to days.

Step 4: Download photos by the link

After downloading the data from Google Photos, then you can move Google Photos to hard drive by "copy & paste" or "drag & drop".

3: Backup Google Photos to Hard Drive with MultCloud

Apart from the above 2 ways of moving Google Photos to a hard drive, you can also utilize an outstanding cloud file manager – MultCloud. It not only offers basic features that you can enjoy on the official website of each cloud. For example, you can share, download, copy, delete, upload, rename files, and so on, but also provides some advanced functions like cloud-to-cloud transfer, cloud-to-cloud sync, cloud-to-cloud backup, converting webpage as PDF / PNG, migrating Gmail or Outlook emails to a cloud drive, etc.

Now, let’s head to how to download Google Photos to a hard drive via MultCloud:

Step 1: Sign up for an account: Register a MultCloud account on the web. Or, you can sign in with your Google or Facebook account.

Step 2: Go to Add Cloud: Head to Add Cloud on the left taskbar, then add Google Photos and grant MultCloud access.

Step 3: Download photos manually: Now, hit Google Photos on the left, and tick the box ahead of the photo, then tap the Download button on the upper side.

Step 4: Drag and drop photos to the hard drive: After the data is downloaded to your computer, you can then move it to the hard drive by dragging and dropping.

Backup Google Photos to Another Cloud using MultCloud

Basically, you can backup Google Photos to hard drive to protect your data. However, some would doubt that the hard drive is threatened by natural disasters and hardware failure. In this case, you can backup Google Photos to another wonderful cloud to manage your photos and videos better. Then you can make use of the cloud-to-cloud backup service of MultCloud.

Step 1. Go to your MultCloud and add Google Photos and another cloud by clicking Add Cloud on the left side. Here, use Google Photos and OneDrive as an example:

Step 2. Head to Cloud Backup on the left side. Then choose Google Photos as the source directory and OneDrive as the target directory. Then, press the Backup Now tab.

As you can see from the above, only 2 steps are needed to backup data across clouds by using MultCloud. There are other merits when using MultCloud to backup data between clouds:

Conclusion

To sum up, if you want to download Google Photos to hard drive, you can use the Google Photos web app, Google Takeout, and a FREE third-party service - MultCloud. Except for basic features, MultCloud also allows you to backup data across clouds with the Cloud Backup feature. On top of Cloud Backup, MultCloud offers other brilliant functions such as Cloud Transfer, Cloud Sync, and Remote Upload. For example, if you want to sync Google Photos with OneDrive, you can ask the Cloud Sync feature for help.