All my photos on my phone are automatically back up to Google Photos. They offer unlimited storage (the images are slightly compressed, though), and so it is great to store all images in the cloud without having to think about limitations.

However, I also like to use Adobe Lightroom or some other photo editing tools to enhance my pictures. In that case, I want my pictures saved locally on my computer. In order to ease this process, I first create a specific album in Google Photos, which I then download and save to my computer – ready for editing.

Unfortunately just recently I wanted to download a huge album (thousands of photo’s and tens of videos in 4K) via Google Photos and this failed. For some reason, I couldn’t download the full album to my desktop. As such I wanted to see what other ways I could download a Google Photos album to my computer.

Method 1: Download via Google Photos website (common method)

You may already know the first method, as it is the most straight forward. In order to download a full photo album from Google Photos to your local hard drive, you follow the following steps:

1. Go to photos.google.com (and login with you Google account)
2. Click on the album you want to download
3. Once the album is open, click on the 3 dots in the top right corner, and select download all
4. A .ZIP file will start to download

It’s quite simple and effective. But the drawback of this method is that it is very time consuming if you want to download multiple Google Photos albums at once! Indeed, you should manually open each album, then select to download all the pictures in that album.

Method 2 (see below) is more flexible.

Method 2: Use Google Takeout to download multiple Google Photos albums

In order to more easily download pictures from Google Photos (per album), you may need to have a look at Google Takeout. This service allows any Google user to download almost any type of data related to their account – including Google Photos pictures and videos.

Here are the steps:

1. Go to takeout.google.com (sign in with your Google account)
2. Scroll down to Google Photos (you may also use CTRL+F to search)
3. Click on All Included Albums
4. Select the albums(s) you want to download (by default, all albums are selected)
5. You may select to split the file into based on size, and select its file type (ZIP, TGZ)

That’s it – very flexible and convenient to download multiple albums in Google Photos at once and save some time and reduce manual effort.