Comment by upcoming-sesame 13 hours ago
All I want is to automatically periodically backup my Google Photos to some S3 compatible storage like B2. I want to do that in case Google nukes my account one day for whatever reason.
I have not found any way to do that until today.
In addition, my local network is slow and I don't have much storage I am limited to solutions that are cloud-to-cloud.
If anyone has any idea, please help me out
Google ripped away the functionality to access your original Google Photos files via any programmatic method vs the manual Google takeout.
This was the biggest reason I also had to move away from Google Photos when all I really wanted was protection from getting my account accidentally G-structed with zero way to contact a human to get my files back.
I am very much aware of rclone, but don't see how it solve the problem I mentioned
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re looking for. Rclone has a Google Photos backend and an S3 backend. I haven’t used it but assumed you could simply copy from Google Photos into S3.
"From March 31, 2025 rclone can only download photos it uploaded"
Also, it still requires to use my bandwidth or to have a VPS running and using it's own bandwidth
I went down the same rabbit hole recently, and there are basically no good options except to periodically do a full Google Takeout of your images. There were tools that used to work, but Google broke them.
One of the many reasons I finally moved off Google Photos.
Presumably you take your photos on your phone, so can you sync from there?
You could manually do it with Google Takeout -> <S3 backed service> before letting your phone sync handle it going forward if that’s a big backlog.
For example, I use Apple and Google on my phone to do this, I think you’d just need to find some app/service combo.