If you’ve used an iPhone, you probably know it’s very easy to automatically backup your content using iCloud. However, if you decide to switch to another service, things aren’t necessarily easy. Thankfully, Apple just made this a lot easier by providing a tool that lets you natively export your iCloud photos and videos to Google Photos.
There are a few prerequisites to this process, including having enough storage on your Google Photos account and enabling two-factor authentication on your Apple account, if you hadn’t already. Once you initiate the transfer process, it takes three to seven days to complete, which Apple says is required to verify the request was made by you and to complete the data transfer. However, if you add or delete files during the process, Apple says there’s a chance they may not be copied to Google Photos, so you’re better off adding these manually once it’s complete.
Although images are kept in their albums, videos aren’t, and only the latest version of a file is copied to Google Photos. Smart Albums, Live Photos, and photo stream content can’t be transferred to Google Photos. Similarly, some metadata and RAW files may be lost when copying files. Finally, duplicates only appear once, which helps you save space in your destination folder, but can be annoying if you did it on purpose in the first place. Once transferred to Google Photos, the filenames of albums and videos start with “Copy of,” so you’ll have to spend some time renaming them if you’re a neat freak like me.
The service is currently available in Australia, Canada, the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States for the time being. To transfer your photos, go to privacy.apple.com and select Transfer a copy of your data.
