There is an easy option to download your photos shared on Google+ . This option not only helps you to keep a back up of your photos but also you can take back up of all your data like : Profile Data, Stream Data, Buzz Data, Circles and Contact Data etc. This service of Google plus is known as Data Liberation process. Here you can download and keep all the data in .zip format except your profile data. This will be saved in an file extension called .json .
How to Download your photos and albums from Google+
If you are using Google+, it should be known to you that Google+ uses your Google Picasa account for storing photos uploaded by you. So the photos will be downloaded from your Picasa Web Albums.
Step 1 : Log in to Google+
Step 2 : Click on the Gear icon present on the top right corner and select “Google+ settings“.
Step 3 : On the next page click on the tab “Data liberation” present on the left hand side.
Step 4 : Click on the “Download your Picasa Web Albums photos” .
Step 5 : In the next page Click on the “Choose Services” tab.
Step 6 : From the listed services click on the “Picasa Web Albums” tab.
Step 7 : Now it will show you the number of estimated files and the size of estimated files. Click on “Create Archeive” button.
Step 7 : On the next page after archive has been created click on the “Download” button.
Step 8 : Now the Download will start. The download time depends upon the size of the photos inside your Picasa Web Album.
During the processes Google may ask you to enter the password of your Google account more than once due to security reason. In that case, just give it as many times it asks.
You can also download other stuffs inside your Google Plus account just like this simple processes. This Feature in Google Plus has been made possible by ” The Data Liberation Front” . This is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.
If the above process doesn’t work or you are facing any kind of problem in doing this, let me know about this by commenting to this post in the comments section. I will be glad to help you.
The process does work, but relies on you to put your uploaded camera photos into albums: my instant uploads go to G+ by date, but do not go into albums that Picasa recoginizes until I manually create an album and put them there…so more than half of my photos are not downloaded when I download my Picasa albums. Is there a workaround?
It would be nice to be able to set an independent permission setting that would allow selected people to download selected Albums or Photos Incl. photo caption which should be used as the file name and location data where it is available. I post lots of family photos and some family members would like to down load copies of images that pertain to them.
I tried this process, and I found it works, but only for the latest 100 albums. Older albums did not appear in the zip archives generated. I had to access my older albums via http://picasaweb.google.com, which still provides for complete album downloads. Interestingly, the albums in the zip archives correspond with those displayed by default in picasaweb/lh/myphotos. The older ones are only shown when you press the “Show More Albums” button.
Anyway – don’t assume the zip archive contains all your albums – you need to check.
Thanks! for the information Richard. This is really useful for the readers.
I was trying to download photos shared by friends through google plus. It seems like I can only view the albums, and I have to download one picture at a time. Is there anyway that I can download the full album at one time? It works if they share through picasa album, but not when shared with google plus