[3 Ways] Sync Google Photos to External Hard Drive
Can I sync Google Photos to an external hard drive? The answer is yes. This post will lend you a hand by providing 3 ways to solve that problem, so please stay here and continue looking through this post.
March 22, 2023 | 4 minutes read
Why Sync Google Photos to an External Hard Drive?
Google Photos is used for storing and sharing photos on the cloud. It is developed by Google, and now gains a lot of users worldwide. But Google Photos still has some detects. For example, it must be used online. Here this post will list 4 reasons why users sync Google Photos to hard drive:
- Must be Online: Because Google Photos stores photos online, it will be difficult if you want to use the photos when your device cannot connect to the network, and this situation will be annoying. However, if you keep the photos on a hard drive, you can use them as long as you take the hard drive.
- Data Security: With the development of the network technology, the data security becomes unstable. If your computer or Google account is attacked by others, the photos that you save on Google Photos may be stolen, deleted, or modified. But if you backup the photos to an external hard drive, there will be another shield for the data.
- Limit of Storage: The storage of Google Photos is relevant to the 15GB free storage of Google Drive. If you want to have more space for photos, you need to upgrade to the paid plan. But the original quality of photos is in big size, so the 15GB might be not enough for you to store many, or you have to compress the quality to save the photos on Google Photos.
- Slower Data Reading Speed: Because your hard drive can read the data without network, the reading speed will be faster than Google Photos.
Due to these 4 reasons, you may know why some users want to sync photos from Google Photos to an external hard drive. But how to do that? The following 3 parts will introduce the solutions to you.
Sync Google Photos to External Hard Drive via Download and Upload
This section will show you how to download photos on Google Photos and how to sync these photos to an external hard drive. The steps will be easy, but the synchronization process depends much on the stable network and it is time-consuming.
Step 1: Enter the website of Google Photos and log in to your account.
Step 2: Tick the photos that you want to sync to the external hard drive, find the icon “More Options” in the upper right corner, then click “Download” to save the photos on your computer.
Step 3: Upload the photos to the hard drive by dragging them from the folder that you used to save the download photos, and dropping them to your hard drive. After that, you transfer Google Photos to the hard drive successfully.
Sync Google Photos to External Hard Drive via Google Takeout
Google Takeout is projected by Google, and it is used to export files, photos, or any others from Google products, such as Gmail and Google Photos. It can help you gather all the contents as an archive, and send the archive to the position you selected.
Step 1: Enter the website of Google Takeout and log in.
Step 2: Turn to “Select data to include” part, and scroll your mouse to find Google Photos, then tick it.
Tip: Google Takeout defaults that you select all the Google products except the option “Access Log Activity”, and you can click “Deselect all” to cancel.
Step 3: Scroll your mouse to the end of this part and click “Next step”. Then it will skip to another part where you should choose the Destination, Frequency, and File type & size for the exportation. Because you want to sync Google Photos to a hard drive, so here the Destination will be “Send download link via email”.
Step 4: After finishing selecting the options, click the button “Create export”.
Step 5: Open the link in the download email and down the archive to your computer.
Step 6: After decompressing the archive, you can sync the photos by dragging and dropping them to the hard drive.
Sync Google Photos to External Hard Drive via MultCloud
In this part, the post will introduce the method with the help of MultCloud. MultCloud can sync Google Photos to external HDD by downloading the photos. Also, it can download data from multiple clouds at the same time, instead of turning to each clouds' websites.
MultCloud is a multi-cloud managing helper which makes the transfer, sync, and backup from one cloud to another cloud more convenient. You can also manage files across clouds in one interface with operations as download, share, and delete on MultCloud.
Step 1: Enter the MultCloud website and click “Sign up Free” for a new account.
Step 2: Click the icon of Google Photos and log in. Then Google Photos will be added to My Cloud Drives.
Step 3: Click “Google Photos” in the left bar, and tick the photos that you are willing to download.
Step 4: Click the button “Download” in the upper bar, and then the photos are downloaded to the local position.
Step 5: Drag the photos that you downloaded before and drop them to the hard drive, then the task is done. Or if the hard drive accesses to your computer, you can change the download path to the hard drive. In that case, you can ignore the former step.
Notes: If you don’t have a hard drive and still want to backup Google Photos, you can sync Google Photos to Google Drive or other cloud drives by MultCloud Cloud Sync. Just repeat Step 2 to add other clouds in, and turn to Cloud Sync. Then you can select what you’d like to sync in both one-way or two-way sync mode. After you click “Sync Now”, your operation is finished.
Conclusion
This post provides you 3 ways on how to sync Google Photos to external hard drive, as solving via Google Takeout, downloading and uploading, and MultCloud. You can choose which one you prefer by comparing steps that are showed in each part. There is no denying that syncing many photos from Google Photos to a hard drive is a time-consuming task, but you can benefit from the synchronization in perspectives like data safety and storage saving.
However, if you think the synchronization is tiresome and you just want to save photos in different places, then you can try MultCloud. Functions like Cloud Sync, and Cloud Backup can be used to backup Google Photos to Google Drive or other cloud drives with just by a few clicks. This time, the process will run fast, and you can be more relaxed.
