Cloud-to-Cloud : Google Photos to iCloud

Firstly, there is nothing wrong Google Photos, I absolutely love Google photos and I’ve been using it since it came out, it is really amazing and very well designed and stable,

🌎 Backup your photos

However, I am also very much aware that photos need to be backed up, if you’re not backing up your photos, you can’t get all precious when you lose them or they get accidentally deleted by one means or another.

🐂 3rd Party Service Backups are horrible

You can back up your photos with lots of third-party services that will back them up straight from Google, But many of the solutions you have for an individual account (Not the Workspace account that’s paid for) very poor and cost a lot of money if you have a lot of photos and data.

🌈 iCloud photos is used as "another" backup location then?

I will be using this solution not to move away from Google photos but to have my photos in two locations so with the worst does happen I still have a valid copy of my photos, if you have advanced data protection enabled in iCloud, you will need to disable it for this import process to work but excluding some additional user workflows that you need to adapt to means you have another location for all your precious photos.

🤖 iCloud Advanced Data Protection : Keep your data, YOUR data!

 however, I very much like the fact that once my photos are imported and advanced data encryption is enabled they are safe from Apple employees taking a peek because without knowing my custom encryption phrase, Apple have no access to this data.

⬇️ The one way sync (from iCloud to Google)

You have been able to export your iCloud photos to Google Photos for quite a while, Apple developed that solution and from what I’m hearing it seems to work pretty well, but the other way around has been a complete mess for years because Google have chosen not to do anything about it.

👀 How "did" you move from Google Photos to iCloud photos then ?

The process you have to follow is something out of storing photos in 2002, it goes like this:

1. Firstly, you need to device this can be Windows or Apple to visit a website to download your data using Google takeout.
   
   
2. Visit Google takeout on https://takeout.google.com
   
   
3. Download all your photos
   
   
4. The downloaded photos will be either be in ZIP/TGZ files, a couple of problems with that zip files can only go to 10 GB and TGZ Files can go up to 50 GB but good luck downloading that for an Internet connection and then opening them if you have a Windows device.
   
   
5. During the download all your metadata and dates will be messed up by the export process, it has a tendency to take the dates. Your photos have been written to the file system as the time they were taken, Rather than the actual time they were taken.
   
   
6. Fix your metadata issues with either an EXIF script or you need to buy another bit of software that will fix the photos from your exported data - link is here : https://metadatafixer.com/
   
   
7. This software will automatically extract all photos and placed them in a folder of your choice in the correct order.
   
   
8. However, if you’re OK with your photos being out of date and in the wrong order, you then need unzip all your compressed data to a folder
   
   
9. If you’re on a Windows computer, you need to buy a Mac to get the photos application, as the equivalent application in Windows is absolutely useless.
   
   
10. If you have a Mac simply open the Photos album,  disable iCloud photo library for now. and point the import at the folder with your uncompressed photos.
    
    
11. Wait for the import to complete and hope it doesn’t crash or you get the beach ball of doom where it seems to hang importing……
    
    
12. Turn on iCloud Photo Library and then painfully wait for it to upload all your photos to iCloud photo library before you can see them on your other devices.

🕳️ Cavets and  Important things to know (if you are following the above plan)

1. The Google Takeout export, depending on the size of your photos may take a long period of time, my export for example took two days and six hours.
   
   
2. Google Takeout export is known to fail to export your photos for no given reason and you need to restart the process again.
   
   
3. Google Take-out export sometimes doesn’t generate the links correctly for your downloads so you will need to generate this link again manually yourself.
   
   
4. Google Takeout can export to many cloud providers storage, but it’s very good at missing out your archives so you end up having to manually download them to fill in the gaps.
   
   
5. That process was very painful and it required you to download all your data from Google and then re-upload it to Apple using yourself as a man in the middle, this is very ineffective because the speed of this will massively depend on your download and upload speed.
   
   
6. Apple photos will absolutely cripple your Internet while it’s uploading the photos because it’s quite inefficient.

👑 Lets talk about internet bandwidth and why its not simple!

If you live in the UK, you may get blazingly fast download speeds, but you usually get pathetically slow upload speeds, Your speeds are not synchronous - In my particular example, it looks like this:

Download : 300Mbps
Upload : 55Mbps

While I do get FTTP (fiber to the premises) even if I go on the top tier possible it looks like this for downloading uploads speed:

Download : 1.1Gbps
Upload : 330Mbps

You also need to remember that many service providers will not let you download at full speed you will be throttled somewhere along the way.

🚀 Google : Custom Takeout to 3rd party services

This has been very painful going from Google to Apple for many years, until that is Google actually fixed this problem and made it so you could export directly to iCloud photo library.

Note : The new method is absolutely not bug free and during your export, you will randomly get an email to say it’s been terminated for an unknown reason and you may have to restart it.

⛅️ Cloud-to-Cloud one-way Sync : Google Photos > iCloud Photo Library

Note : You do not loose your data in Google Photos is simply creates a copy of the data in iCloud

The first thing you need to do is visit the link below to start the custom export, If you would rather not click on a web link, you can copy and paste the link and visit it manually:

https://takeout.google.com/takeout/transfer/custom/photos

That will get you to this point where you will only get "Google Photos" as the service, notice this is still Google Takeout:

Then you need to confirm the access to your Google account as below:

Note : When you click continue you will receive a couple of emails as you have granted Google Takeout access to your services

Next you need to choose the service you wish to transfer to which for this is Apple - iCloud Photos:

Then you will end up on iCloud which will require you to login to iCloud

Then you will need to confirm the permission with Apple (like you did with Google) you need Allow here:

Once you have allowed access you will back to Google once more, this will confirm the last step before the data copy is processed:

Then when you click Agree and Continue you will see this update in Google Takeout telling you that the export is in progress:

You will also immediately get an email from Google that will look like this, however this is notification that the transfer has been requested not started:

You will then need to wait for a e-mail from Apple that informs you that the transfer is in progress like this:

This email will then mean data should be flowing from Google Photos to iCloud Photos, however the first items its transfers are all the albums then you photos are next in line to to be transferred, however this may take some time.