If you, like me, are constantly receiving emails and notifications from Google about your storage being full, there’s a high chance that the automatic backup from Google Photos has consumed your free 15GB (or your paid plan).
When you hit the storage limit, you stop receiving emails in Gmail, and you can’t save new documents to Google Drive.
The safest and most cost-effective solution is to perform a full backup of your photos to an External Hard Drive or SSD and then free up space in the cloud.
Let’s walk through the process using the official tool: Google Takeout.
Step-by-Step: Backing Up Google Photos via Google Takeout
Google Takeout is the official service for exporting your data. Follow these steps to ensure no photo is left behind:
- While logged into your account, access: takeout.google.com.
- In the list of services, click “Deselect all” at the top of the page.
- Scroll down until you find Google Photos and check the box next to it. Pro Tip: You can click “All photo albums included” to select specific years or albums to reduce the download size.
- Go to the bottom of the page and click “Next step”.
Configuring Destination and Format
On the next screen, choose these options to make the backup process to your drive easier:
- Destination: “Send download link via email”.
- Frequency: “Export once”.
- File type: “.zip”.
- File size: I recommend choosing 10GB or 50GB if you have a lot of photos. This prevents Google from splitting your backup into hundreds of small 2GB files.
Finally, click “Create export”.
⚠️ Important: The Waiting Time
Google does not generate the file instantly. Depending on the size of your library (if you have 100GB or more, for example), it may take hours or even days for the link to arrive in your email. Please be patient.
Extra Tip: What Are These .JSON Files?
When you open the backup on your External Drive, you’ll see that each photo is accompanied by a file with the same name and a .json extension.
These files contain metadata (date, photo location, tags).
If you only want the images, you can ignore or delete the JSON files, but the photos alone might lose exact time information in other software timelines.
Conclusion
Creating a physical backup is the only way to guarantee ownership of your files without remaining hostage to monthly cloud storage fees.
After downloading everything to your hard drive and confirming the files open correctly, you can delete the photos from Google Photos to reset your storage counter.
Did you manage to free up space in your account? If you have questions about organizing the downloaded files, leave your comment!