Mai's Google account was locked on a Tuesday. No warning — just "suspicious activity detected" and a recovery form that went nowhere. It took eleven days and a lot of luck to get back in. The first thing she did after recovering access wasn't celebrating. It was asking: where else can my photos live?
She already paid for Dropbox for work. Two terabytes, barely used. Perfect — except there is no "export to Dropbox" button anywhere in Google Photos, and since Google killed library API access in 2025, apps can't quietly do it for you either.
Why the obvious route fails
The DIY path is: download everything from Google, then upload everything to Dropbox. For a 100 GB library that means 200 GB through your home connection — days of a laptop that must not sleep, must not lose Wi-Fi, must have 100 GB of free disk it probably doesn't have. One hiccup at 80% and you're starting over with no idea which files made it.
The cloud-to-cloud route
The trick is to never let the data touch your computer:
- Export with Takeout, deliver to Drive. At takeout.google.com, select only Google Photos and choose "Add to Drive" as delivery. Your export lands in Google Drive without a single local download. (Yes, we're using Google's own storage as a loading dock.)
- Connect both clouds to CloudSync — the Google Drive holding the export, and your Dropbox.
- Run Takeout Import: source = the zip in Drive, destination = a Dropbox folder. CloudSync streams the archive server-side, unpacks it, keeps the photos and albums, skips Google's metadata junk. Your laptop can be off.
- Delete the zips from Drive afterwards to reclaim the space.
For ongoing top-ups, CloudSync's Picker flow syncs newly selected photos straight from Google Photos to Dropbox on demand — the only mechanism Google still allows, and it takes minutes.
What Mai's setup looks like now
Photos still land in Google Photos from her phone — it's good at that. But every month, a 10-minute picker session pushes the new ones to Dropbox, and Dropbox syncs a nightly mirror to a cheap Backblaze bucket via another CloudSync rule. Three copies, two providers she pays for, one that can't be taken away by a mystery "suspicious activity" flag.
The next account lockout will be an annoyance, not a hostage situation. That's the whole point.