Just spent two evenings with a friend of my mom who was losing her mind because Google was threatening to cut off her emails if she didn’t clear out pay for more storage space. Obviously her phone was uploading all her pictures so every time she cleared some space Google happily filled it back up for her automatically. Fortunately her frantic deletions were within the last 30 days so takeout recovered 36GB of dead husband pictures from a 15GB Drive. But let me tell you, clearing out Google Photos was tedious, there is no Select All button in the web interface because leaving their service is not something they want you to do.
If you ever have to do something like this again, rclone supports mounting Google Drive, at which point you’ll be able to work with it as if it’s a proper filesystem.
it has a few limitations, like google stores metadata (exif data) separately, so downloaded photos don’t have them, there is another tool that puzzles it together automatically.
but now that I read it, for more than a year now rclone is only allowed to download what it uploaded? what bullshit is that, google?
Just spent two evenings with a friend of my mom who was losing her mind because Google was threatening to cut off her emails if she didn’t clear out pay for more storage space. Obviously her phone was uploading all her pictures so every time she cleared some space Google happily filled it back up for her automatically. Fortunately her frantic deletions were within the last 30 days so takeout recovered 36GB of dead husband pictures from a 15GB Drive. But let me tell you, clearing out Google Photos was tedious, there is no Select All button in the web interface because leaving their service is not something they want you to do.
If you ever have to do something like this again,
rclonesupports mounting Google Drive, at which point you’ll be able to work with it as if it’s a proper filesystem.https://rclone.org/drive/
Wow, I didn’t know that.
I can see I’m going to have to do something similar in the future, so my future self thanks you
photos on google photos might only be accessible with the appropriate rclone backend: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
it has a few limitations, like google stores metadata (exif data) separately, so downloaded photos don’t have them, there is another tool that puzzles it together automatically.
but now that I read it, for more than a year now rclone is only allowed to download what it uploaded? what bullshit is that, google?