Download Your Media From Google Photos

 Procedure to Download Your Media From Google Photos

If not all of your photos and videos are transferring, they're probably in the cloud. Cloud storage has changed the way we take care of our data. Earlier, you need to backup and transfer files between devices directly, or else you wouldn't have them in multiple locations. If you took photos on your iPhone or Android, for example, you'd often want to plug it into your computer to make sure those photos were both backed up and easily accessible for sharing with friends, family and the internet at large.

The problem is, we've changed the way we deal with data these days. If you plug your smartphone into your computer expecting to transfer all the photos and videos in your photos app of choice, you might be surprised to find that only a fraction of the images actually make their way to your PC. It's confusing, considering that media is accessible on the phone: 

It happened with one of Reddit user, who took to the Google Pixel subreddit with the issue. This user was trying to transfer his late wife's media library from Google Photos on her Pixel to their PC, but only the photos and videos from roughly the last six months would end up on their computer. There was about four and a half years worth of images which were seemingly trapped on her phone, and wouldn't even appear when he took at a look at her Google Drive account.

This story has a happy ending  with the rest of the photos and videos in the library were saved to the cloud: Only a recent snapshot of photos were actually saved on the Pixel itself, while the rest were being shown as previews from the cloud. Google doesn't make it clear, that's what is happening here, and easily leads to confusion: If you see all your photos in one place, you naturally assume they are ok, all in the same place.

Procedure to download Google Photos 

Simply log into Google Photos' web app. Here, you can access your entire Google Photos library and choose to download any and all of the images here to another location, such as your computer. If you were interested in a handful of specific images to transfer, it's easy to download them on-device. You can choose the image in question, tap the three dots More button, then choose Download. This will pull the image from the cloud and onto your phone, which will then allow it to transfer when you connect your phone to your computer.