Archiving Google Photos offline to free up space

If you backup your phone photos to Google Photos automatically, and you don’t pay for some kind of Google One subscription, you’ll run sooner or later into the 15 GB storage limit of your Google account.

15 GB is not a lot, especially when you consider than my Pixel 6a takes pictures that are easily 3 to 5 MB each. 😬

To be fair, if you want convenience and you value your time, Google One’s $20/year for 100 GB is a pretty damn good deal. Same goes for the higher options with more storage if you need.

But if you don’t like recurring bills like me, and you find it overkill to keep that many old photos in the cloud, read on.

My protocol for archiving photos away from Google

In order to save space, I’ll periodically archive my old photos outside of Google Photos.

This protocol is designed to archive photos from the phone that are backed up to Google Photos, but preserving the phone’s original arborescence. Google Photos doesn’t have the path information, only the filename, so backing up from Google Photos directly would not work for this use case.

The downside is that this doesn’t cover the case where you have photos in Google Photos that are not on your phone.

Also it’s designed for a single phone backing up to a Google Photos account that’s used solely for that device. Multiple devices sharing the same Google Photos is not supported.

With that said, here’s how I do it.

1. Sync phone to computer

First, I use Syncthing to sync the contents of my phone to my computer.

I configure Syncthing as “send only” on my phone, and “receive only” on my computer, and I configure it to sync the root directory of my phone (which can be tricky, but possible).

After the sync is complete, I turn off Syncthing from my computer, to make sure no incremental updates will happen during the archive process.

2. Double check I’m not missing anything

If some photos are only on Google Photos but not stored on the phone, the previous step didn’t archive them. We need to make sure to download them from Google Photos in the first place.

Because there’s no way from Google Photos to find all photos that are not locally saved to a specific device (other than going through them one by one), that’s where I use the Google Photos API to make sure I’m not missing anything.

This will get technical, so if you don’t care about this part, feel free to skip to the next step.

First, we need a Google OAuth token with access to Google Photos. We’ll reuse my script from this other article for this, just replacing the scope with https://www.googleapis.com/auth/photoslibrary.readonly. Put it in a token.mjs file and run it with node token.mjs, this will go through the OAuth process and after you complete the authentication, will log the access token that we’ll use in the next script.

The following script can go in photos.mjs and be run with node photos.mjs, reusing the token from the previous step.

import fs from 'node:fs/promises'

const accessToken = 'YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN'

let pageToken = ''
let pages = []

do {
  const url = 'https://photoslibrary.googleapis.com/v1/mediaItems?pageSize=100&pageToken=' + encodeURIComponent(pageToken)

  console.log(url)

  const response = await fetch(url, {
    headers: {
      'Authorization': `Bearer ${accessToken}`
    }
  })

  const json = await response.json()

  pages.push(json)

  pageToken = json.nextPageToken
} while (pageToken)

await fs.writeFile('pages.json', JSON.stringify(pages, null, 2))

This will fetch all pages from the Google Photos API and dump them in a pages.json file.

From there, I like to use jq to extract the filenames:

cat pages.json | jq -r '.[].mediaItems[].filename' | sort > gphoto-files

Now, let’s make a list of all the files local to the phone. I’ll only scan the directories I configured to be backed up on Google Photos. Adjust this to your needs.

find DCIM Pictures Movies Download \( -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.jpeg' -o -name '*.mp4' -o -name '*.png' -o -name '*.webp' \) > ~/phone-files
cat phone-files | xargs basename | sort > phone-basefiles

cat gphoto-files | awk -F. '{print $NF}' | sort | uniq

Now we have a sorted list of the files on Google Photos and on the phone, we can use the comm command to find missing entries:

# See what's on the phone but not on Google Photos
comm -23 phone-basefiles gphoto-files

# See what's on Google Photos but not on the phone
comm -23 gphoto-files phone-basefiles

If I’m missing some files, I’ll go on and download them from Google Photos to my phone and run the sync again, and repeat this process until everything is consistent.

When a file is missing from the phone, look at pages.json to find the corresponding Google Photos link!

cat gphoto-files | while read file; do find . -name "$file" | grep -q . || echo "Missing $file"; done

3. Copy synced folder to archive

For this example, let’s assume I synced my phone to a /Volumes/Syncthing/Phone directory, and I want to archive my old photos in /Volumes/Archive/Phone.

I’ll run the following command to copy the phone contents to my archive directory (but copying from Finder also works). Here I’m only copying the directories I configured to be backed up to Google Photos in the first place.

mkdir -p /Volumes/Archive/Phone
cp -a /Volumes/Syncthing/Phone/{DCIM,Pictures,Movies,Download} /Volumes/Archive/Phone

If the target directory already exists, this will append new files to it (and overwrite them if a file already exists there)!

At that point I like to remove empty directories from the archive. This also involves removing .DS_Store files on Mac, and .nomedia if you use WhatsApp, to make sure the empty directories can actually be identified as such.

find . -type f -name .nomedia -delete
find . -type f -name .DS_Store -delete
find . -type d -empty | while read dir; do rmdir -v "$dir"; done

The last command is not recursive so you may need to run it a few times in the case a parent directory only contained empty directories. It’s done when it outputs nothing.

4. Delete everything from Google Photos

Not necessarily everything, but well, everything you want to delete to free up space.

You can do it from your phone, or from Google Photos on your computer, or on the web, although in my experience, I would recommend doing it from the phone.

When deleting a lot of photos from the web version, this tends to confuse the phone’s syncing algorithm and I’ve ended up with a bunch of photos being re-uploaded and somehow duplicated and it was kind of a mess to clean up.

It tends to just work when deleting from the phone. The only downside is that the app doesn’t make it easy to select a whole bunch of photos at once, I just have to hold my thumb for a minute with the super slow scroll until everything is selected.

5. Sync phone to computer again

Again with Syncthing in my case, I do a sync following the deletion.

Now in our example, /Volumes/Syncthing/Phone contains just the photos we decided to keep around in Google Photos, while /Volumes/Archive/Phone contains all the photos (also including the ones we kept around).

6. Remove the overlap

To avoid that duplication, we can remove all files from the archive that are still in the Syncthing directory. That is, all the photos/videos we kept, as well as all the files in the phone storage that are not managed by Google Photos.

(cd /Volumes/Syncthing/Phone && find . -type f) | while read f; do
  file="/Volumes/Archive/Phone/$f"

  if [ -f "$file" ]; then
    rm -v "$file"
  fi
done

Now, the archive directory only contains what we removed from Google Photos (and from the phone).

We can confirm with the following command:

find /Volumes/Archive/Phone -type f | grep -v DS_Store | wc -l

It should match the number of files deleted from Google Photos earlier.

We can also one last check:

find /Volumes/Syncthing/Phone/{DCIM,Pictures,Movies,Download} \( -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.jpeg' -o -name '*.mp4' -o -name '*.png' -o -name '*.webp' \) | wc -l

This should match the number of photos currently on Google Photos (if you kept any).

7. Profit!

You can now enjoy all the space you freed up by archiving your photos and videos away from Google Photos!

Repeat every time you’re close to running out of storage. 😉

What about motion photos?

Google’s motion photos are the equivalent of Apple’s live photos: a photo that also contains a short video of the “moment” it was captured.

What happens to those during our archival process? Well, it’s complicated.

In short, don’t worry, they’re backed up and the little video that goes with the motion photo is not going to be lost, but you won’t be able to watch the “live” part anymore, you’ll only see the still picture.

The reason is that Google stores the MP4 video part at the end of the JPEG file. This doesn’t prevent displaying the image, but there’s currently no photo viewer other than Google Photos that knows to extract that MP4 section following the JPEG data, and display it properly.

So if you want to see the live part of a motion photo, you’ll have to re-import it to Google Photos.

Alternatively, you can extract the MP4 part of the motion photo to a different file, which you can do by using a script like detailed in this post.

Conclusion

Archiving photos away from Google Photos is not trivial, but possible.

If you care about not losing any of your photos, I recommend double checking at every step that you’re not accidentally forgetting any file.

When done well, this allows to periodically free up some space from your Google account without actually having to get rid of your photos and videos! They’ll still be available on your archive hard drive if you want to. Your old photos are not as handy as if they were in the cloud, but you know you can access them if needed.

Overall, you’re probably better off just paying Google to increase your storage, but if you’re really motivated, I hope you can find inspiration in the process I described in this post.