A few hours late, Google carried out its threat: it eliminated the album archives, a sort of mixed bag where photos of extinct services, such as the old Hangouts, were stored. Google gave us a month to check out what we have there and save it, but if you left it at the last minute and forgot to save it, we have good news: you can still make a backup.
Last note for latecomers: if you had photos in your Google albums archive, the web version of the archive is no longer accessible, but it is always possible to download a backup with Google Takeout, although we recommend that you hurry because, according to information from Google, they could disappear from there at any time.
Last chance to recover your photos
It lasted a few hours longer than expected, but the album archives are history. calm down, that this has nothing to do with google photos albums: The Albums Archive was a mixed bag where Google found collections of outdated product photos, from screenshots of old Hangouts in the days of Google+ to Picasa web albums.
The album archive site no longer exists, but all is not lost. For starters, photos that were shown there that belong to products that continue to exist, are retained in these new products. For example, Blogger pictures are still on Blogger and your old profile pictures are still in your Google account settings.
The album archive shows this message today
However, all you had there belonging to defunct products, will disappear. For example, screenshots and photos from Hangouts that have not been migrated to Google Chat, the older ones. Google gave us the option to download the albums from the albums archive itself, but that option is no longer available today.
What you can still do is download backup with google takeout, where the album archive is still available, at least for now. We cannot guarantee that it will stay there for long, since Google has officially told us that we can download it until July 19 and that date has already passed.
The process is simple: you need to open the Google Takeout website and press uncheck allthen check the box next to album archive. then press Next stepat the bottom.
Export options can be left as is. just press create an export and then all you have to do is wait. Since album archives usually have little content, the export will usually be ready in a few minutes, but you don’t need to watch the screen: Google notifies you by email.
In this email you have a link to download fileswhich will download your backup album archive in a ZIP file with folders corresponding to each album you had.
For example, albums belonging to Hangouts are located in the Hangouts folder, each of them with the corresponding photo and its metadata in a JSON file.
Our recommendation is that if you wish not to lose these photos, download backup ASAPbecause it is likely that the product will also disappear from Google Takeout in the near future.
Picture | With elements from Nhi Nguyễn Tường and Jan on Pixabay
