Duc found out his mother's phone had been backing up photos to Google Photos for six years — 30,000 pictures, 40 GB — the day her Google One payment failed. The warning email was blunt: over quota, and content "may be deleted" after 24 months of non-payment. He decided to copy everything into the family's Google Drive, where they had a 2 TB plan with room to spare.
How hard could it be? Both products are Google. There's even a checkbox for it somewhere... or there was.
The trap: Photos and Drive stopped talking in 2019
Until July 2019, Google Photos and Google Drive were connected — photos showed up in a Drive folder automatically. Google removed that integration, and since then the two products have been completely separate silos. Same company, same account, zero sync.
Then it got worse. In March 2025 Google shut down third-party API access to your photo library, which quietly killed every tool that used to do this migration. Search for "sync google photos to drive" today and you'll find a graveyard of tutorials describing buttons that no longer exist.
What Duc tried first (don't do this)
- Select-all download. Google Photos caps browser downloads around 500 items; selecting photos by hand, 500 at a time, for 30,000 photos, is 60 rounds of clicking. He gave up at round four.
- Google Takeout, the manual way. Takeout produced eight 4 GB zip files. His laptop had 11 GB free. He downloaded them in pairs, extracted, uploaded to Drive, deleted, repeated — and the folder structure came out flattened with thousands of
.jsonfiles sprinkled everywhere. Two evenings gone, half done, structure ruined.
The 10-minute version
Here's the flow that actually works, using Takeout's one good trick plus a cloud-to-cloud tool:
- Go to takeout.google.com, deselect everything except Google Photos, and — this is the key — choose "Add to Drive" as the delivery method. Google puts the zips directly into your Drive. Nothing touches your laptop.
- In CloudSync, connect that Google Drive account and open Takeout Import.
- Point it at the Takeout zip, choose a destination folder in Drive, hit Start.
- CloudSync unpacks the archive cloud-side: keeps every photo and video, preserves album folders, and silently discards the JSON/HTML clutter. It runs in the background — close the tab if you like.
For photos taken after the big export, use CloudSync's Google Photos Picker flow: select recent photos in Google's own picker (Shift-click grabs a whole range) and sync them to the same Drive folder. Ten minutes a month keeps the archive current.
The moral
Your photos being "in Google" doesn't mean they're safe from Google — quota changes, account locks and product decisions all happen without asking you. A second copy in a place you choose costs one Takeout export and one import. Duc's mother's photos now live in two places, and the monthly top-up takes less time than making coffee.