Download a single photo back to your device
Open any photo at Google Photos.
Tap the 3-dot menu or swipe upwards.
Choose Download. If the photo is already on your device, the option will not appear.
On my Android device the photo is saved to DCIM/Restored and in Google Photos shown in Camera.
Download multiple photos back to your device
When you used "Free up space" all photos are still in the Photos tab of Google Photos, but the folder structure is lost.
When photos were uploaded with setting "Storage saver" (or former "High Quality") the original is also lost.
On iPhone or iPad
On iOS you can select multiple photos > use the Share button > Save to device.
See also //support.google.com/photos/thread/86166997You can also use iTunes.
On Android (and some also on iOS)
On Android there is no option to transfer multiple photos from Google Photos back to your camera roll.
You can go to //photos.google.com/ on the phone, select several photos, tap 3-dots > Download.
They will be saved as a ZIP file, for example in the "Downloads" folder, where you can "extract" them.You can "Share" selected photos with Google Drive and download from there, but that will probably double the storage used by the photos. Therefore not recommended.
Similarly you can share with "File manager +" when you install that app, and download to the folder you want.You can use Google Takeout: go to //takeout.google.com/settings/takeout in a browser
You will also get lots of .json files which you can delete. I recommend to try with a small album to start with.Deselect all products, then select Google photos
Tap "All photo albums", then deselect all
Select an album, for example "Photos from 2022", and tap OK
Scroll down till the end and tap "Next step"
When settings are OK, tap "Create export" and wait till ready
When ready tap "Download" and Unzip
You can download the photos on a computer, connect the Android phone with the computer (USB cable) and copy the photos to the device. See //support.google.com/android/answer/9064445.
See more options on //www.wikihow.com/Transfer-Images-from-Computer-to-Mobile-Phone
You can use the Google One app once to restore the 200 most recent photos.
See //support.google.com/photos/thread/84975423
Also note that it is not really safe to delete from your device without making an extra backup. See this article.
This is the closest question the web and is closed to replies: How can I copy a Google Photo Album into a shared Google Drive Folder?
[edit]
Summary: Can you copy an organised album of photos via the cloud to Google Drive?
Ideally without downloading them.
I find it silly that I can't organize or archive Albums into Google Drive. It appears they have changed something because originally when I added the Google Photos to GD I remember it working. In fact, I can still find old GD folders in GP search, but not new ones.
Also, I have tried to use the old folders to shuffle groups of photos around, but as soon as I move the group in GD to a new folder, GP associates it with the old album, and even renames it to the old folder name when viewing in GD. So I haven't figured out how to get groups of photos from GP to GD no matter how difficult a method.
This seems like a whole lot of processing to make the photos stay in an Album. It may be partly explained by some of the docs about what happens when folders are deleted, to retain their integrity, or maybe Google thinks as the commentor in the Google Product Forum puts it "this also allows photo comments, so I think it will be more fun :)".
A shame, Google used to be about efficiency with logical search operators in GMail that have been curtailed in search, and now GD can't even be used to organize GPs..
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Last Updated : June 10, 2022
You can select an entire album in your Android device's gallery and upload it to Google Drive at the same time. Here's how
Steps to upload an entire album:
- Open the Gallery app on your device.
- Touch the Menu button in the top-right corner of your screen.
- Touch "Select album."
- Touch each album you want to upload to your Drive app. Note that the Gallery will count the number of albums you've selected.
- Touch the Send button at the top of your screen and select Drive.
- Touch "OK" to upload the selected albums to Google Drive.
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