Transfer Google Photos to Personal Google Account

Opportunity

The photos and videos in your Berkeley Google Photos are separate from the photos and videos in your Berkeley Google Drive folders. However, they still count against your storage limit, so you may want to transfer them to a personal Google account. If you do not wish to transfer your photos to another account, you could download them manually or use Google Takeout.

Transfer photos and videos to another account

It’s easy to transfer your photos and videos to a non-Berkeley Google account using Partner Sharing. 

 

Note: Your photo albums, structures and sharing settings will not be transferred; therefore you will need to: 

• Manually recreate and sort each album in the account you are transferring to. 

• Re-share any photos you have shared with others. 

• Address photos that you have archived or put in the Trash because they will not transfer. 

 

Start Partner Sharing

Note: It’s best to start this process from the browser on your computer as opposed to through your mobile device.

 

1. Navigate to Google Photos at photos.google.com in your Berkeley Google account.

2. Click on the Settings icon in the upper right corner and then scroll down to Sharing and then choose Partner Sharing.

3. Where it says Partner Sharing, click Get started.

Get Started button for Partner Sharing

 

4. Select “All photos” under Choose photos to include and click Next.

Choose “All Photos”

 

5. Enter your personal Google account’s email address in the field provided and click Next. (You can only transfer to another Google account.)

Enter your personal Gmail address

 

6. Confirm everything looks correct and click Send invitation.

 

7. Open an incognito window or another Chrome profile and log into your personal Google account.

 

8. Go to Google Photos with your personal account. 

   1. You will see a notification symbol next to Shared in the left sidebar. You will also receive an email invitation. It may take a few minutes to receive the invitation.

9. Click on Sharing and you will see the Invitation.

10. Click View Invitation.

11. Click Accept.

Accept Share Invitation

 

12. You will be taken to an album with all of your photos/videos from your Berkeley Google account. A popup will be in front of the album offering for you to “Share back” your personal Photos with your Berkeley account. Click “Not now.”

Choose “Not Now” for Share back

 

13. A popup will then offer you the ability to “Turn on auto save.” If you don’t see this popup, you can access this setting at any time from the Gear in the upper-right, and then choose the Partner Sharing settings. 

 

14. Click Get started to get to the Turn on auto-save option and select “Save all photos” then click Done. 

Turn on auto-save and then choose “Save all photos”

 

15. You will continue to see a popup offering you to Share back your photos with your source account. Continue to close this popup. This can get confusing because both of your accounts might have the same first name and the windows look very similar. 

 

Note: Depending on how many photos and videos you currently have in your Berkeley Google Photos, it may take a while for Google to auto-save your photos/videos to your personal account (especially videos). To be safe, we recommend waiting at least 24 hours before disconnecting Partner Sharing and deleting your photos/videos from your Berkeley account.

 

Stop Partner Sharing

After you have confirmed that all of your photos and videos have been saved to your personal Google account, you are ready to stop Partner Sharing. 

 

1. Navigate to Google Photos at photos.google.com in your Berkeley Google account.

2. Use the Gear in the upper right to find the Partner Sharing settings. 

3. Click Remove partner at the bottom of the window and then confirm by clicking Remove in the popup.

 

Choose “Remove Partner”

If all of the photos/videos that you saved to your personal account from your Berkeley account are still there after removing Partner Sharing, you should be safe to delete them from your Berkeley account. 

 

Delete photos and videos

Google allows you to delete your photos and videos individually or in bulk from Google Photos. However, if you have a lot of photos/videos, this process is manual and will take a while to complete.

 

1. Navigate to Google Photos at photos.google.com in your Berkeley Google account.

2. Choose how you want to select your photos/videos:

   1. Choose Photos from the left menu

   2. Mouse over the date above a set of photos and then click the checkmark that is revealed beside every date in your library to select every photo from that date.

   3. Click the checkmark in the top left corner of the most recent photo in that set, then scroll down to the last photo, hold down Shift and select that last photo. This should select all of the photos.

3. Click the trash can icon in the top right corner of the page and click Move to trash to confirm your deletion. (You may need to click Got it before Move to trash appears if you’ve never deleted data from Google Photos.)

Click the Trash can to confirm photo deletion

Note: If you have a lot of photos, you may want to do this in stages.