Tomorrow, another service will join Google’s famous graveyard. These are the “album archives”, a system the company launched in 2016 to store images from Picasa Web Albums, another Google service that ended up shutting down. The goal was for all the images to be there, including those of Blogger and Hangouts -closed in 2022-.
Since it seems that there are no more services that use this storage, Google announced a few weeks ago the closure of the Album Archive. You have until tomorrow July 19 to upload the photos that you have there, but we are going to tell you how to access them and, also, how to download them in a very simple way.
How to download your Google Albums archive
Even if Google’s idea was good, little by little the Album Archive became obsolete
As the saying goes, Hangouts stored their photos there, as well as Blogger before moving to its own system, so if you have used these services, you may have some hardware. For this reason we are going to tell you how to download a copy of the archive albums so you don’t lose anything.
The first thing you need to do is access the service’s website, which you can do it via mobile or pc. It is this https://get.google.com/albumarchive and as soon as you access it you will see if you have material or not. You will also receive a pop-up informing you that the service is closing on July 19 and a link to Takeout.
Google Takeout is the tool to create a backup
You need to make sure ‘Album archive’ is checked and give you the next step. Once done, in the second step you have several options such as selecting the export frequency (in this case once, since the service will close), you can select if you want a -zip file or – tgz, the size of the generated file (1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 10 GB and 50 GB) and how you want it transferred to you.
In this case, you can choose to send yourself a download link by e-mail, but also to add the file to Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box
Once done, you must click on ‘Create an export’ and voila. All that remains is to wait and Google itself warns you that it may take days to complete the process depending on the file size. In many cases, it’s to avoid getting tangled up, I generated a Google backup that was over 50GB and it didn’t take more than a few hours.
You have now secured the contents of your Google Albums archive. It goes without saying that you have to be calm, because the only thing that closes is that, or your photos from Google Photos, Drive, or other Google services (for now). So, if you are interested in seeing what you have stored there, I recommend that you go there as soon as possible because if you leave it for tomorrow, you will surely forget it.
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