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Switching from Google Photos to iCloud Photos just became a whole lot easier
- Google and Apple are launching a tool that will help users migrate their photos and videos more easily from Google Photos to iCloud Photos.
- The tool is expected to roll out over the course of the next week.
Google and Apple have joined forces to launch a new tool that should make it easier to migrate your photos from Google Photos to iCloud Photos. If this sounds familiar, the two tech giants did something similar in 2021 by launching a tool that did the opposite — transferred iCloud Photos to Google Photos.
The move is part of the open-source Data Transfer Project, which focuses on building systems to ensure the “integrity of a person’s data is intact when going from one service to another.” Given this, the Data Transfer Project aligns data models, authentication, and any other elements to facilitate easy and secure data portability.
A blog post by the Data Transfer Initiative noted that the tool will roll out over the next week. The article also linked to Apple and Google’s support pages, which feature instructions on how to transfer photos and videos between the two services. In its support page, Apple notes that the time taken to transfer photos and videos from Google Photos to iCloud Photos can vary from a few hours to days, depending on the size of the files.
When the migration is complete, you’ll receive a confirmation email from Apple. Transferred files will be located in a separate album titled “Import from Google” within the Photos app. The files will remain on your Google Photos as well, so if you want them removed, you’ll need to manually delete them from there.