Migrating Photos from Facebook to Google Photos

There has been a shift within cloud services such as Google, Facebook and others. That shift is to make migrating photos from one service quick and easy. The old fashioned method would be to download media from service A before re-uploading it to service B. This requires lots of space on hard drives and this could be a luxury you do not have, especially with laptop drives being as small as they are.

By some paradox laptops have become so slim and small that we are still using 250gb to 1TB drives in devices, that if fatter, could hold 8TB disks. Imagine a laptop with an affordable eight terabyte drive. Imagine how different laptop user experiences would be.

Clicking Easy

That is not the point of this blog post. The point of this blog post is to say that moving photos from Facebook to Google Photos is as easy as to or three clicks, and most clicks are to say “yes, allow meta to access blah blah”, in this case Google services.

Fast

Moving Data from Facebook to Google Photos was very fast. It took a few minutes. It moved all the files from Facebook to Google before then incrementally adding photos to the relevant albums. Remember, back in the zeros and the tens we would upload photos deliberately and add album names. Facebook has sent these to Google Photos and Google Photos is now populating all of these albums.

Temporarily empty

Plenty of albums are “empty” as I write this post, but that’s because it takes time for Google Photos to read the JSON files and re-create the album structures with the right photos and other data.

Wrong Date

The other issue is that all the photos are marked as being created today, i.e. the date that the photos were moved from gallery A to Gallery B. I suspect that this will be corrected at a later stage, once the albums have been populated with the right images.

The Nice Thing

The nice thing about this quick experiment is that Facebook made photo sharing awful. There was a time in 2007 when Facebook was a network of friends, and friends of friends, but from Zynga onwards it became rubbish because it became about marketers and others getting ROI, at the cost of users getting rubbish. Now within seconds I have access to photos from two decades of my life. I can, at a glance see photos, with the name of the event, and be transported to another era. It’s nice.

And Finally

This experiment was done with my backup Google account rather than the primary one. This experiment was with the free account and I am using 8.5 GB of 20 GB. I am well within the free tier.

Try it, it’s “free” and you’ll find exploring photo albums easier.