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 a hard drive connected 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. 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:

cp -a /Volumes/Syncthing/Phone/ /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)!

Also if the directory already exists, the trailing slashes are important.

3. 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.

As an abundance of caution, you may want to double check that the number of photos/videos you have on Google Photos matches exactly with the number of photos/videos you have on your phone before doing that.

If there’s any mismatch, try to find where the difference it to make sure you’re not accidentally losing any photo.

Alternatively, you can use the Google Photos API to list all the filenames on Google Photos, and ensure you have a match in your archive prior to deleting. Otherwise, you’ll know the names of the missing ones that you have to download.

4. 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).

On top of that, both directories contains all other files from the phone, that are not managed by Google Photos.

5. 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 rm -v "/Volumes/Archive/Phone/$f"; done

Now, the archive directory only contains what we removed from Google Photos (and from the phone), but there’s no duplicates!

6. 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. 😉

About the Google Photos app “home page”

I think there may be some display bugs when deleting a lot of photos from Google Photos at once. For some reason the main photos list of my Google Photos still shows a few of the photos I deleted! They’re in a weird state where the UI offers me download them to my device (as if they’re not on the device already), but also shows me a local path to the file as if it was on device (but the photo is not actually there).

I’m thinking this issue will be gone when the photos in the trash are permanently deleted, so this doesn’t concern me too much. What’s visible in Google Photos on the web (and in their API) is consistent with the state I want, and what’s on my phone’s raw storage is consistent too.

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.

Bonus: script to list all your Google Photos using the API

In the previous section, we saw it can be useful to list all the photos from Google Photos (not necessarily on any of your devices) prior to running the archiving process, to make sure you can catch the ones that are not backed up anywhere.

You can put this script in photos.mjs and run as node photos.mjs. You’ll need to put a Google OAuth access token with access to your Google Photos for this to work.

If you want to generate one from the CLI, check out my article on the subject.

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. You can then iterate through it to do whatever operations you need to, e.g. making sure you don’t leave any photo around before deleting them from Google.

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.

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