Late last year, Facebook introduced a means to export photos to Google Photos. The tool was launched in Ireland in December, and it’s now become available to users in Australia.
Part of the Data Transfer Project, the tool will help users of Facebook export their photos and videos from the social platform and into Google Photos. For users who’ve uploaded a lot of photos to Facebook, this will provide a one-click tool to back those photos up in a more useful place, instead of having to download them one at a time from Facebook and store them somewhere else.
Once in Google Photos, the data is then easily moved to wherever you want it; users can add all Facebook photos/videos to an album for example, then easily download the lot for storage offline, or to upload somewhere else.
Data portability such as this is a great idea. Google’s been offering a form of it for years in the form of Google Takeout, allowing users to download their email, calendars, contacts, photos, documents and more in a series of (often quite large) archive files.
Facebook allowing users to take their photos and videos and automatically stick them in Google Photos is a great initiative, and in time we hope that Facebook will build out further functionality and other “takeout”-style options – e.g. to store photos/videos in OneDrive, or other online storage options (Dropbox, Amazon S3, and so on).
Will you be uploading your photos and videos out of Facebook for safe-keeping in Google Photos? I will.
That could be good. Will it retain the photo’s metadata (date/time, location etc.), so when viewed in Google photos, they appear in the correct date/time they were taken?
Yes, the photos came through with their albums tagged with ‘Copy of AlbumX’, and all the date/location info. However all the videos from the second process (you have to do photos or videos not both at the same time) all came in as added to Google photos today.