Google Photos Export Takes Forever? What to Expect and Do
Why a Google Takeout photo export takes hours or days, why it comes as many 2 GB zips, how to download every part, and what to prepare while you wait.
You clicked "Create export" a day ago and the page still says Google is preparing it. Or it finished, and the download is 47 separate zips of 2 GB each. Both are normal. Neither is fun.
Why it takes so long
Takeout does not just copy your files. For each photo it pulls the original out of storage, writes a .json sidecar with the date, location and description, and packs both into a zip. A library of 60,000 photos means 120,000 files to produce. Google also queues exports, so at busy times you wait behind other people.
Google's own estimate is "hours or possibly days". In practice a few thousand photos take an hour or two. A few hundred gigabytes take a day, sometimes two. You get an email when it is ready. Refreshing the page does not speed it up.
Exports occasionally fail with a vague error. When that happens, request again with fewer years or albums selected. Smaller exports finish more reliably.
Why it comes in parts
On the request page Google asks for a file size: 2 GB, 4 GB, 10 GB or 50 GB. The default is 2 GB. A 90 GB library at 2 GB is 45 zips. Each fills up and the next one starts, with no regard for albums or years, so one album can span three parts.
Pick 10 GB or 50 GB if your connection is stable. Fewer parts means fewer clicks and fewer chances to miss one. Pick 2 GB if your connection drops, because a failed 50 GB download has to start over. Browsers do not resume Takeout downloads reliably.
The parts are plain zips, not a multi-volume archive. Each opens on its own. Google Takeout split into many zip parts explains how to merge them.
Send it to a cloud drive instead
Under "Delivery method" you can have Google add the export to Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box instead of emailing you download links. For very large libraries this is more reliable than clicking 45 links in a browser, because the cloud service's desktop client syncs the files down and retries on its own.
The catch is space. Adding to Google Drive counts against the same storage quota your photos already use, so a full account cannot receive its own export. Dropbox or OneDrive work if you have room there.
What to do while you wait
Do not delete anything from Google Photos until the export is downloaded, unpacked and checked. Days later is fine. Now is not.
Make room on disk. You need space for the zips and, separately, for the unpacked folder, so roughly twice the export size. If you plan to organize the photos into a new folder as well, count a third time. How much disk space a Google Takeout export needs has the numbers.
Decide where the photos are going. Apple Photos, an Android phone, Immich, a NAS, or a plain folder on a drive. The destination changes what you do after unpacking. The leaving Google Photos checklist lays out the whole route.
Install what you need. exiftool if you want to do it by hand, 7-Zip on Windows for faster unzipping, or the app below.
Download every part
When the email arrives, the Takeout page lists each part with a download button. Download links work for seven days. After that you request the export again.
Download them all into one folder. Name order matters: takeout-20260901T101500Z-001.zip, -002.zip and so on. When you are done, sort the folder by name and check for gaps. A missing -012 means a download failed silently.
Check sizes too. Every part should be close to the size you chose except the last one, which is smaller. A part at 1.3 GB among 2 GB parts is probably truncated. Re-download it from the same page.
Google may ask you to sign in again for each download. It also limits how many downloads run at once, so start three or four and let them finish before starting more.
After the download
Unpack every part into the same folder. Then the second surprise: every photo shows the date you unzipped it. The real dates are in the sidecars, and your computer does not read them. Google Takeout photos show the wrong date explains the fix.
The app
Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer takes the zips directly, so you skip the unpacking step.
Select all the parts, or pick one and the app finds the rest in the same folder. It counts them against the numbering and flags a missing part before it starts, so you find out about -012 while the download links still work. It checks that the disk has room for the unpacked files, then unpacks, reads every sidecar, writes the real date and GPS into each photo and sorts them into folders.
Photos that appear in several album folders are written once. Dry run shows what would happen without writing anything. Runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, offline. Free for 500 photos, $9.99 once for unlimited.
Frequently asked questions
Can I speed the export up?
No. You can only make it smaller. Export one year or one album at a time if you are in a hurry for a specific set.
Why is my export bigger than my library?
Album folders contain copies of photos that are also in the year folders, so a photo in three albums appears four times. The sidecars add a few kilobytes each. And "Storage saver" compression is applied to what Google stores, so an export can only be as large as the stored files, but it is often bigger than the number shown on your storage page because of those album copies.
Are shared albums included?
Albums you created and shared are included. Albums other people shared with you are not, unless you saved the photos to your own library first.
The export finished but some years are missing. Why?
Check that you selected all albums and all years on the request page, and that every part downloaded. Then check whether the missing photos were in a partner-shared library, which is not yours to export.