This makes it easy to save similar images, such as ones from the same place. Use the search bar to filter your images – such as by location or date – then pick from the results. If you’re planning on categorizing snaps on your hard drive, it’s also a good opportunity to download batches to match your sorting criteria. Google also offers a free storage management tool to help you find and delete shots that are underexposed or blurry, which should make it easier to pick through pictures to find your favorites. While this method isn’t as simple as downloading all of your Google Photos images in one go, it allows you to save data by selecting only the shots you really want to keep. Google will compress your chosen shots into a single zip archive, ready for saving.

Once you’re happy with your choice, click the three vertical dots in the topĬlick ‘download’.

Holding shift when you click will also allow you to highlight batches of snaps between the first and last shots you select. You can then click other images to add to your selection. Open Google Photos on the web and hover over a particular image’s thumbnail and click the checkmark in the top left.

Thankfully, Takeout will preserve the album structure in the resulting download folder.īear in mind, though, that you won’t be able to preview the contents of any albums through Takeout – so you might want to cross-reference each folder’s contents with Google Photos in another tab. If you click the button labeled ‘all photo albums included’ a pop-up will let you select or deselect specific albums in your library – as well as entire years. If this is what you want to do, then skip to step #3. This will include your entire image library in the download. Scroll down the list of products until you find Google Photos and check that. In this case, we'll assume you only want to download your Google Photos images and video - so click ‘deselect all’ under the ‘select data to include’ tab. Then, you'll be able to start the process and select the content from your Google account that you’d like to download. First, you'll want to head to and sign in to your Google account.

Back up photos to google