Long is a wedding photographer. Google Photos was his archive: 400 GB of delivered albums going back a decade. Then two letters arrived in the same month — a Google One price increase, and an email from a 2016 client asking for their wedding photos because their house had flooded.
Finding that album took him 40 minutes of scrolling. Downloading it took three attempts. That week he decided the archive deserved better than being a tenant in someone else's app.
Why S3-compatible storage?
- Price: Backblaze B2 charges ~$6/TB/month; Cloudflare R2 ~$15/TB with free egress; AWS S3 Glacier tiers go near $1/TB for cold archives. Long's 400 GB costs him under $3/month on B2 — versus the $10+ Google wanted.
- Control: a bucket has no "suspicious activity" bot that locks your whole digital life. Access keys are yours; there's nothing to appeal.
- Structure: files stay files. Albums are folders. Any tool — rclone, a backup app, a future you — can read them without an export ritual.
The two-step migration
The problem: Google Photos speaks neither S3 nor anything else since the 2025 API lockdown. The solution is the same loading-dock pattern that works for every destination:
- Takeout → Drive. Export Google Photos at takeout.google.com with "Add to Drive" delivery. For 400 GB that's a handful of 50 GB zips appearing in Drive over a day or so. Nothing downloads locally.
- Drive → S3 with CloudSync. Connect Google Drive and your bucket (S3, R2 and B2 are first-class citizens — just paste the access key, secret and bucket name). Run Takeout Import per zip: it unpacks cloud-side, writes
Album Name/photo.jpgstructure into the bucket, and drops the JSON sidecars.
New work goes straight to the bucket now — but for phone photos he still lets Google Photos capture them, then pushes keepers to the bucket monthly with CloudSync's Picker sync. A daily mirror rule (with dry-run preview, so nothing gets deleted blind) keeps a second bucket region in step.
The flood-proof answer
Last month another old client asked for their photos. Long opened his bucket, made a presigned link to the album folder, and sent it — ninety seconds, from his phone. The archive finally works for him instead of the other way around.
Storage you rent is a service. Storage you control is an asset. For a photo archive you hope to keep for fifty years, be an owner.