In a Surprising Twist, Apple Just Launched a Tool to Transfer iCloud Photos to Google Photos (But There’s a Catch)

In a very unusual move, Apple has just begun offering a new tool that will allow users of iCloud Photos to easily transfer their entire iCloud Photo Library to a competing service — Google Photos — in one fell swoop.

While there are already ways to move your iCloud photos into Google Photos (and vice-versa), the process has generally been a cumbersome one, especially for users with massive libraries that are too big to fit on an iOS device. However, Apple’s new web-based tool will allow you to run the entire process directly from Apple’s iCloud servers, without the need to bring your iPhone, iPad, or Mac into the mix, nor use your home internet bandwidth to download photos from iCloud Photo Library and then re-upload them to Google Photos.

The new feature, which is highlighted in an Apple support document, appears to be simply the first step toward embracing additional third-party services, noting that it’s “initially available to customers in Australia, Canada, the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States for transfers to Google Photos.” This suggests that additional photo services may be coming soon, and it’s likely that for now, Google Photos was both the most popular and easiest choice for Apple to embrace.

How the Photo Transfer Works

The transfer is done through Apple’s Privacy portal — the same tool that’s been available for a little over two years to download a copy of your data. However, now a new section titled Transfer a copy of your data has been added specifically for iCloud photos and videos.

Much like the way Apple’s support document is written, however, it appears that the new section will eventually expand not only to other photo services, but likely enable data transfer from other areas of iCloud, such as mail, calendars, contacts, and files.

For now, though, it’s entirely about getting photos from your iCloud Photo Library to Google Photos, and it’s remarkably straightforward. Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to privacy.apple.com.
2. Sign in with your Apple ID and password.
3. Click on Request to transfer a copy of your data.
4. On the next page, you’ll see totals for the numbers of photos, videos, and overall storage in your iCloud Photos Library.
5. From the “Select Destination” downtown, choose Google Photos.
6. Check the boxes beside Photos and/or Videos, as appropriate.
7. Click Continue.
8. You’ll see a notice advising you of the minimum amount of free storage required in your Google account.
9. Click Continue.
10. When prompted, sign into your Google account.
11. When prompted, grant permission for Apple to add photos and videos to your Google Photos account.
12. Click Confirm Transfer.

Note that the process may take anywhere from 3 to 7 days depending on the size of your iCloud Photos Library.

Limitations

Due to differences in the way that iCloud Photos and Google Photos work, not everything will be transferred over seamlessly, and there are definitely some things to be aware of, and while some of are obvious, others are less so.

1. Your photos must be stored in iCloud Photo Library. This tool works on the back-end, on Apple’s servers, so it doesn’t copy photos that are stored only on your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook. Only those that have been synced with iCloud Photo Library will be transferred.
2. Only your final edits are transferred. While iCloud Photos supports non-destructive editing of photos, which allows you to easily revert to your original photo, this data doesn’t get transferred to Google Photos. If you’ve edited a photo, only the most recent edit will show up on Google Photos — the original will remain behind.
3. Duplicates will appear as just one photo. If you have multiple identical copies of a photo in iCloud, only one will go to Google Photos.
4. Videos albums are not transferred. While photos will be transferred with their corresponding albums (wherever possible), videos will not be. This means that while all of your videos should be transferred to Google Drive, they won’t be contained in any albums when they get there.
5. Files will be renamed. On the Google Drive side, all of your albums and videos will have the prefix “Copy of” attached.
6. Google Photos also has a limit of 20,000 photos per album, so if you have any albums in your iCloud library that are larger than that, only the first 20,000 photos will be included in the album; the remainder will still be transferred, but they won’t be part of the album.

The following data types will not be transferred to Google Photos at all:

• Shared Albums
• Smart Albums
• Photo Stream content
• Live photos
• “Some” metadata (although Apple doesn’t specify which).

Why Is Apple Doing This?

Although you may think it’s odd for Apple to so easily allow iCloud users to move to the competition, it’s actually part of a coalition that Apple joined two years ago known as the Data Transfer Project, with the stated goal of making it easier to move data between services to avoid lock-in.

Even though many services have offered the ability to download all of your data for some time, the real issue is that this still limits most users’ options, since just because you can download your data to your computer doesn’t mean you know what to do with it once it gets there.

The aim of the Data Transfer Project, on the other hand, is to create tools exactly like this one that Apple is now offering, providing seamless solutions that allow just about anybody to move their data from one service to another.

It appears that the onus on building these tools, however, is being placed on the companies that run each of the services that currently hold data; hence Apple is providing the tool to move photos from iCloud to other services, while it will be up to Google to provide a way for Google Photos users to migrate to iCloud Photo Library.

Building this kind of “one-click” interoperability isn’t simple, of course, which is likely why it’s taken so long for Apple to introduce even the first tool, and even though two years ago, Google was reportedly poised to begin offering its own solutions, most of those also have yet to materialize. Still, now that things are ramping up we don’t imagine it will be long before Apple’s privacy portal begins offering ways to move other types of data out of iCloud.