If you tried to back up Google Photos with any third-party tool lately, you've probably seen it fail. That's not a bug in the tool — in March 2025 Google removed the API scopes that allowed apps to read your photo library. Every backup tool, from rclone to commercial sync services, lost access overnight.
Your photos are now effectively locked in, unless you use one of the two mechanisms Google still allows. Here's how both work, and when to use which.
Why this matters: Google Photos is not a backup
People treat Google Photos as their family archive. But consider what can go wrong:
- Account lockout. Automated systems suspend Google accounts every day — often with no human appeal process. Lose the account, lose every photo in it.
- Storage full. The free 15 GB fills up fast, and photos stop backing up from your phone silently.
- One provider = one point of failure. Any archive that exists in exactly one place is one mistake away from not existing.
The 3-2-1 backup rule says: three copies, two different media, one off-site. A second cloud (your own S3 bucket, Dropbox, OneDrive) is the easiest way to get there.
Option 1: The Picker API — for ongoing, selective backup
Google's replacement for library access is the Photos Picker API: an app can only see photos you explicitly select in Google's own picker interface. It's manual by design — no app can "watch" your library anymore.
With CloudSync this flow looks like:
- Connect Google Photos and your destination cloud (Drive, Dropbox, S3, anything).
- Open the picker and select photos or albums — Shift-click selects a whole range, so grabbing a few thousand photos takes a minute.
- Run the sync. Selected photos stream directly to the destination; nothing is stored on our servers.
Best for: backing up recent photos every month or two. Limitation: you must re-open the picker to include new photos — Google requires it.
Option 2: Google Takeout — for the full library
Takeout is the only way to export 100% of your library, and it's official. The catch: it hands you a pile of zip files with JSON metadata scattered everywhere, and turning that into a clean folder structure on another cloud is painful by hand.
The efficient path:
- Go to takeout.google.com, deselect everything except Google Photos.
- Choose "Add to Drive" as the delivery method — the export lands directly in your Google Drive, no downloading multi-gigabyte zips to your laptop.
- In CloudSync, open Takeout Import, point it at the zip, choose a destination cloud.
- CloudSync unpacks it in the cloud: keeps photos and videos, preserves album folders, and skips the JSON/HTML clutter automatically.
Best for: the initial full backup, or a complete migration away from Google Photos.
The recommended setup
Do both: one Takeout import to capture everything you have today, then a monthly 10-minute picker session for new photos. Your library ends up on storage you control — S3 and Backblaze B2 cost roughly $1–6 per terabyte per month.
Start with CloudSync's free plan — it's enough to test the whole flow before committing to anything.