How to Actually Get Your Pet Photos Out of Google Photos, iCloud, and LINE Albums

Every article about protecting your photos ends the same way: make sure you have your own copy. Ours did too. It is good advice and completely useless on its own, because nobody tells you what "get your own copy" actually involves.

So here is the missing half. Four services, the real steps, and the traps that make an export look successful when it is not.

Set aside an evening. Most of it is waiting.

Why bother, if the photos are already backed up?

Because "backed up" and "yours" are different properties, and only one of them survives a change in someone else's business model.

The pattern is well documented by now: a service is generous while it is growing, then storage becomes the thing you pay for rather than a thing you get. Snapchat capped free Memories storage in 2025 and asked people to subscribe to keep full access to a past they had already stored. LINE compresses what you upload and deletes paid-tier videos 30 days after you stop paying. In 2022, a Japanese family-album app announced its shutdown with roughly 27 days' notice. None of that is malice. It is what happens when the thing you love is a line item on someone else's balance sheet.

An export costs you one evening and permanently removes the leverage. We wrote about how to judge where your photos should live; this is how to act on it.

How do I export from Google Photos?

Use Google Takeout (takeout.google.com). It is Google's own bulk export and the only route that preserves album structure.

1. Open Takeout and click Deselect all. The default selects every Google product you have ever used, which turns a photo export into a 60 GB archive of Gmail you did not ask for.
2. Tick Google Photos only. Use "All photo albums included" to choose specific albums if you want a smaller first run.
3. Choose delivery. Pick an archive size you can actually handle — large libraries are split into multiple files, and a single enormous archive is harder to resume if the download drops.
4. Submit, then wait. Google emails a link when it is ready; this takes minutes for a small library and can take days for a large one.
5. Download every part. The links expire after a limited window, so do not start this the night before a trip.

The metadata trap. Takeout does not necessarily write your dates and locations back into the image files. Much of that information arrives in separate .json files sitting beside each photo — IMG_2024.jpg and IMG_2024.jpg.json. If you copy just the JPEGs somewhere new, you can end up with a library where every photo of your dog as a puppy is dated today.

So: keep the .json files, do not "tidy them away", and if you import into another service, use one that reads them. When you spot-check the result, check a date, not just that the picture opens.

How do I export from iCloud Photos?

Two routes, and the one you want depends on whether you have a Mac.

On a Mac, the Photos app gives you the most faithful copy. Select the photos, then File → Export → Export Unmodified Original. "Unmodified Original" is the important phrase: the plain Export option re-encodes and bakes in your edits, which is fine for sharing and wrong for an archive. Note that Apple devices often shoot in HEIC, which some older software cannot open — export as-is for the archive, and convert copies later if you need to.

Without a Mac, request a copy of your data through Apple's privacy portal (privacy.apple.com) and choose iCloud Photos. Apple prepares an archive and notifies you when it is ready. Like Takeout, this is a "start it and walk away" job.

What you should not do is select-all in iCloud.com and hope. Browser bulk downloads of very large selections are the least reliable path, and the failure is usually partial and quiet.

What about LINE albums?

This is the one with no good answer, so it is worth being blunt.

There is no bulk export. You save albums one at a time from inside the app, on the phone, by hand. If you have thirty albums, that is thirty separate operations.

Worse, what comes back is not what you put in. LINE compresses photos on upload, so the file you save is the reduced version it kept, not your original. If the original is still on the phone that took it, that phone is your real source — not the album.

The practical conclusion: treat a LINE album as a place you showed photos, not the place they live. Export what you can, accept the quality loss on anything whose original is gone, and stop adding memories you cannot get back. If part of the reason you use it is that relatives can see the photos easily, there are ways to include people without asking them to install anything.

What about Amazon Photos and everything else?

Amazon Photos allows bulk download from the web interface, and the desktop app is more reliable for large libraries — browser downloads of thousands of files tend to fail somewhere in the middle. Note that the free unlimited full-resolution photo storage is tied to a Prime membership; if Prime lapses, the terms that made it attractive lapse with it.

For anything not covered here, the shape of the question is always the same:

• Is there an official bulk export, or only "save this one"?
• Does it return originals or the service's re-encoded copy?
• Does the metadata come back in the files, or in sidecars, or not at all?
• Is export available on the free tier, or does leaving require paying first?

If the answer to the last one is "pay first", you are not a customer. You are a hostage with a subscription.

How do I check the export actually worked?

This is the step everyone skips, and it is the only one that turns an export into a backup.

Count the files. Compare the total against the number the service told you it had. A ten-percent shortfall is not a rounding error; it is a failed export you were about to trust.

Open the oldest and the newest. Pick a few from each end of your archive. Old files are where format problems hide, and new ones are where an interrupted download lands.

Check a date, not just an image. Open the file properties on a photo you know the real date of. If it says today, you have hit the metadata trap above, and better to know now.

Play one video. Videos are larger, fail more often, and are the thing people most regret losing. One is enough to prove the path works.

Put it in two places. An external drive and a second cloud service. At least one should be something you can physically hold, because that is the copy no terms-of-service update can reach.

Then put a reminder in your calendar for a year from now. An archive that stops at 2026 is a time capsule, not a backup — and the easiest day to do this again is the day it is only twelve months of catching up.

What to do this weekend

If you do nothing else:

1. Start a Google Takeout now, before you finish reading. It runs while you do other things.
2. While it builds, save the three LINE albums you would actually miss.
3. When the archive lands, do the five checks above. Ten minutes.
4. Copy it to a second location.
5. Tell one other adult in the family where the archive lives. A backup only one person can find has a bus factor of one.

Where Memofu stands

We publish this as policy rather than a feature: full export is free on every Memofu plan, forever, including after you cancel. Not a paid tier, not a support ticket, not a limited number of exports per year. Your originals come back as your originals.

That is a deliberately unglamorous promise, and it is the one that matters most, because it is the only one that stays true if we get something else wrong. A service that has to keep earning your trust behaves differently from one that already has your photos. We would rather be the first kind.

You can read what the app actually does on the features page, and exactly what is free and what is paid on the pricing page — where you will notice that storage of what you have already saved is never the thing we charge for.

Wherever your photos live today, though, the export is worth doing this weekend. Do it while everything is calm and it is an evening of waiting. Do it when something has gone wrong and it may not be possible at all.