HACKER Q&A
📣 mijoharas

Is there no way to incrementally backup from Google photos?


I'm sorting out all my backups and just got around to Google photos.

It seems that the options for backup are:

1. Use takeout to get a single backup.

That's it.

There is no way I can tell to get incremental backups. It seems that there used to be[0][1], but some permissions changes on Google's side made them impossible.

Is there really no way to do this?

What alternatives are worth considering for a cloud based photo tool, that actually allows you to backup?

[0] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

[1] https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

  👤 mijoharas Accepted Answer ✓
Options I have found:

Somewhat manual, using takeout (seems a lot of effort): https://www.markhansen.co.nz/google-photos-backup/

A script using a headless browser (maybe scriptable, but sounds brittle): https://github.com/vikas5914/google-photos-backup

👤 pettycashstash2
I am interested in this as well. Thanks for asking.
👤 magarnicle
My method is to backup the photos 'at source', and treat Google Photos as another backup location. So I use Syncthing on my phone to copy new photos to my PC where I can do whatever backup strategy I like (restic, rclone and Backblaze in my case). The Google Photos app on my phone is also sending them to the cloud for convenience.
👤 mijoharas
Does anyone use immich?[0].

Can it be used alongside Google photos so as pictures are taken they're backed up to both services?

[0] https://immich.app/