google takeout

Google has no "download all" button, and every official route for moving your library out is slow and manual. If you are switching to Proton Drive for privacy, you have two practical paths.

Proton's official way exports your whole library through Google Takeout, then imports it into Proton Drive; the desktop import is Windows-only. Blober connects to Google Photos directly and transfers your photos to Proton Drive without Takeout, on any platform. This guide walks through both with the trade-offs, so you can pick the one that fits your library.

Proton's official guide, "How to import from Google Photos into Proton Drive"^[1], has three steps:

1. Export your Google Photos. Sign in at takeout.google.com, select Google Photos, and create an export. Google prepares the archive in the background and emails you a download link, which is valid for one week.
2. Download your export. Download all parts, then unzip them.
3. Import into Proton Drive. Either drag the unzipped folders into the Photos tab in the web app, or use the Windows desktop app: Photos import, then Import from Google Photos.

Proton's own documentation flags the rough edges:

• It is Windows-only for the desktop import. The feature announcement says "Google Photos import now supported on Drive for Windows" and notes "Photo import support for macOS is coming soon"^[2].
• Takeout scatters albums. "Google Takeout splits large exports into multiple parts, but it may not keep photos from the same year in the same part... This can cause issues if you're using Proton Drive's desktop app, which builds albums based on folder structure"^[3]. Proton's advice is to manually reorganize photos into year folders before importing.

For a small library, this path works. For tens of thousands of photos, it is a multi-day chore: wait for the export, download zips, extract, reorganize, then upload.

Blober is a desktop app that connects to Google Photos and to Proton Drive as two endpoints, then transfers the photos you select between them.

1. Connect Google Photos in Blober (you see your whole library in a file browser).
2. Connect Proton Drive (a browser window opens to Proton's own login page; your password never touches Blober).
3. Select the photos you want and start the transfer.

Google Photos has no folders. When you browse your library in Blober, the date-based view you see (for example 2026-08-23/IMG...) is a virtual grouping Blober builds so you can find photos by when they were taken - nothing is moving between real Google folders. There is no source folder tree to preserve.

Where your photos land in Proton then depends on which surface you choose as the destination:

• A folder in Proton Drive (My Files) - for example the root or a Google Photos folder. My Files is a normal folder tree, so Blober's YYYY-MM-DD/{filename} organization creates real date folders here.
• The Proton Photos surface (the timeline). Proton Photos is flat: it has no folders, only a date timeline plus albums. A YYYY-MM-DD/{filename} template cannot create folders on this surface, so every photo is uploaded flat into the timeline and sorted by its capture date instead. In Blober's preview the destination shows as Photos/{filename}, which reflects that. Google Photos albums are not recreated on either surface.

Pick My Files if you want a real date-folder structure. Pick Proton Photos if you want the timeline and albums. You can also move between the two later - see How to Move Photos from My Files to Proton Photos.

The differences from Takeout:

	Google Takeout + Proton import	Blober
Export wait	Hours to days for the archive email	None
Zips and unzipping	Yes, often 2 GB parts	No
Album structure	Can scatter photos across folders; manual reorganizing advised	Google Photos albums are not recreated. YYYY-MM-DD folders are created when the destination is a Proton Drive (My Files) folder; the Proton Photos surface is a flat timeline and has no folders
Platform	Desktop import is Windows-only; web is drag-and-drop	macOS, Windows, Linux
Resume on failure	No	Yes, per-file progress with automatic retry
Direct to Proton	Requires local download and re-upload	Streams directly to Proton Drive
Disk space	Needs free local disk for the whole library	Streams through memory, no full copy staged

Takeout is designed for backup, not migration. Its pain points are well documented in the community: the export can take a day or more, downloads split into 2 GB zips, there is no resume, and album metadata often lands in separate JSON files instead of real folders. People build entire tools to work around it. A developer who migrated 354 GB wrote up the script he built, "gphoto2proton," precisely because the official flows are so manual^[4].

Blober removes those steps entirely: no export request, no zips, no reorganizing. It reads the library in place and writes it straight to Proton Drive.

• Check your Proton storage first. The free plan is 5 GB. A large photo library needs Drive Plus (200 GB), Unlimited (500 GB), or Duo (2 TB)^[5].
• Keep originals until the transfer finishes. Verify a sample of photos in Proton Drive before deleting anything from Google Photos. Proton's own post-migration advice is to remove them from Google Photos only after they are safely stored^[6].
• Re-run for new photos. You can run the workflow again later to catch photos added since the last transfer. An interrupted run can be resumed from where it stopped.
• HEIC and RAW files transfer as-is. Blober copies the original files, so formats and EXIF metadata are preserved.

Can Proton Drive replace Google Photos? For private, encrypted photo storage, yes. Proton Drive has automatic mobile photo backup, albums, favorites, filters, and a timeline^[7]. It does not have Google's face recognition or unlimited free compression. The move is the hard part, which is what this guide covers.

Can I transfer all of my Google Photos to a hard drive? Yes. Connect Google Photos as the source in Blober and select your local disk as the destination. Blober downloads the whole library without Takeout, and re-runs can skip files that are already on the drive. See the related guide on backing up Google Photos below.

Does Blober use Google Takeout? No. Blober connects to Google Photos directly and transfers photos from the library, so there is no export request, no zip files, and no waiting for an email link. This is the key difference from Proton's official import flow.

Is Proton's Google Photos import available on macOS? Not yet. Proton's desktop import feature is Windows-only as of 2026, with macOS "coming soon"^[8]. Blober runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Will my albums be preserved when moving to Proton Drive? With Takeout, album structure can be scattered across folders, and Proton advises manually reorganizing by year to get clean albums^[9]. With Blober, Google Photos albums are not recreated. Each photo lands in a YYYY-MM-DD folder when the destination is a Proton Drive (My Files) folder; if the destination is the Proton Photos surface, photos land flat in the timeline because Proton Photos has no folders - only a timeline and albums.

How do I move Google Drive files (not photos) to Proton Drive? Proton offers a manual import guide for Google Drive files that uses drag-and-drop^[10]. Blober also handles Google Drive to Proton Drive transfers directly, alongside photos. See Migrating To or From Proton Drive.

• How to Move Photos from My Files to Proton Photos
• How to Backup Google Photos Without Google Takeout
• What Is Proton Drive? Features, Plans, and What It's Used For
• Migrating To or From Proton Drive

If you have 10,000 or 50,000 photos in Google Photos and you want them on your computer, Google gives you two options:

1. Select photos manually in the web interface. You can select up to 500 at a time, click download, and receive a zip file. Then repeat until you have covered your entire library.
2. Use Google Takeout to request an export of your entire library. Google will prepare zip archives and email you a download link. This process can take hours or even days depending on library size.

Neither option lets you browse your library, pick a destination, and transfer everything in one step. There is no sync, no resume, and no way to send files directly to another cloud provider.

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Google Takeout is the official way to export your Google Photos library. On paper it works. In practice, it has real limitations:

• Wait time. Google creates your archive in the background. For large libraries, this can take 12 to 48 hours.
• Zip file format. Your photos arrive in multiple zip archives, often split into 2 GB chunks. You have to download each zip and extract them manually.
• No folder structure. Takeout dumps all photos into flat directories organized by date. If you had albums, those names may appear as metadata JSON files next to the images, not as actual folders.
• No resume. If a download fails, you start over. There is no incremental sync.
• No direct cloud transfer. You cannot send Takeout exports directly to Dropbox, Backblaze, or a NAS. Everything goes through your browser first.

For someone with 200 GB of family photos, Google Takeout means hours of waiting followed by hours of downloading and extracting.

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Until early 2025, rclone had a Google Photos backend that could list and download your photo library. Then Google changed their API access policy.

Starting March 31, 2025, rclone can only download photos that were uploaded through the rclone API itself. If you uploaded your photos through the Google Photos app, the web interface, or any other method, rclone cannot access them anymore.

The rclone documentation states it clearly: "From March 31, 2025 rclone can only download photos it uploaded."

This means rclone is no longer a viable tool for backing up or migrating an existing Google Photos library. Other transfer tools like MultCloud, Flexify, and various CLI utilities face the same restriction or never supported Google Photos at all.

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Blober is a desktop application that connects to Google Photos and gives you a visual file browser showing your entire library. From there, you can:

• Download all photos and videos to your local disk, external drive, or NAS
• Transfer your library to Dropbox, Google Drive, Backblaze B2, AWS S3, or any other supported provider
• Browse by album, date, or folder with a familiar file manager interface
• Resume interrupted transfers automatically if your connection drops
• Optionally replace files with existing filenames by setting destination deduplication to Overwrite the existing file. The default skips them instead

No Google Takeout. No zip files. No manual selection. You connect your Google Photos account, pick a destination, and Blober handles the rest.

Feature	Google Takeout	Blober
Bulk download	Yes, after hours of waiting	Yes, immediate
Folder structure	Flat zip archives	Albums and dates preserved
Resume on failure	No	Yes, automatic
Transfer to another cloud	No, browser download only	Yes, direct to any provider
Real-time browsing	No	Yes, visual file browser
Incremental sync	No	Re-runs into a local drive or NAS can skip already-downloaded files

For repeat exports, see how task resume and destination deduplication prevent duplicate downloads. Resume an interrupted task to preserve its per-file progress. When you intentionally start a new export into the same folder, the destination skips files that are already there by default, and you can switch it to overwrite them instead.

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Connect Google Photos in Blober, select your local disk as the destination, and transfer. Every photo and video downloads to a folder on your computer. If you have 100 GB of photos, Blober will transfer them without creating zip files or requiring extraction.

If you are leaving Google Photos for another service, Blober lets you transfer your library directly. Connect Google Photos as the source and Dropbox as the destination. Your photos move from one cloud to the other without touching your local disk (or through it, if you prefer a local copy).

Pair Google Photos with Backblaze B2 in Blober. Your entire photo library gets copied to B2 at $6.95/TB/month for storage. This gives you an independent backup that does not depend on Google.

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Google Photos is not a backup. It is a service that can change its terms, adjust its storage pricing, or restrict access at any time. The March 2025 API change proved that: tools that worked for years stopped working overnight.

Having a local copy of your photos, or a copy in a second cloud provider, means you are not dependent on a single company to access your own memories.

Blober makes that transfer possible without the pain of Google Takeout, without CLI configuration, and without selecting 500 photos at a time.

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• Anyone with a large Google Photos library who wants a local backup
• Users leaving Google Photos for Dropbox, iCloud, or another service
• Parents and families with years of photos who want a second copy on a hard drive
• Photographers who used Google Photos as a sync target and need to migrate
• Privacy-conscious users who want their photos on storage they control

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Blober is a one-time purchase with a lifetime license. No subscriptions. No transfer fees. No transfer limits. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Download Blober at blober.io