Guide

How to move your Google Photos to OneDrive

This one is different from moving files. Since March 2025, Google no longer lets any outside app or service read your Google Photos library — so there is no cloud-to-cloud shortcut, and any service claiming to copy Google Photos for you is either out of date or asking for your password. The one route that works is Google's own export tool, Takeout, which can deliver your photos straight into OneDrive. Here's how, and what to watch for.

Updated September 2026 · Applies to personal Google accounts and OneDrive Personal / Microsoft 365

First, pick your method

Method 1 — Download a selection, upload it

Good for a trip, an album, or a few hundred pictures.

1. Open photos.google.com. Hover over the first photo, tick it, then hold Shift and tick the last one to select a range. Or open an album and use the three-dot menu → Download all.
2. Google packs the selection into a zip. Unzip it on your computer.
3. Open onedrive.live.com → Upload → Folder and pick the unzipped folder.

Method 2 — Google Takeout, delivered to OneDrive

Takeout builds a complete export of your library in the background and can upload it directly into your OneDrive, without anything passing through your computer.

1. Go to takeout.google.com and sign in with the Google account your photos are in.
2. Click Deselect all, scroll down and tick Google Photos only. Click All photo albums included if you only want some albums.
3. Click Next step.
4. Under Destination, choose Add to OneDrive.
5. Choose Export once, file type .zip, and the largest archive size (50 GB) so you get fewer pieces.
6. Click Link accounts and create export and sign in to Microsoft when asked.

Google emails you when the export is ready. A few thousand photos take an hour or two; a library of tens of thousands of photos and videos can take several days. The zip files appear in a folder Google creates in your OneDrive.

The part that catches people: dates

Photos that were taken with a phone or camera keep their date inside the file, and OneDrive reads it correctly. But screenshots, pictures saved from messaging apps, and anything whose date you edited in Google Photos often don't carry that date inside the file — Google kept it in its own database. In the export, that information sits in a small .json file next to each photo. OneDrive ignores those files, so those photos show up dated to the day you unzipped them.

For most people this affects a minority of photos. If your library is mostly phone camera shots, you'll be fine. If it's full of screenshots and forwarded pictures, know that their order will be off in OneDrive, and keep the Google account until you're sure you can live with that.

What Takeout leaves behind

• Partner-shared photos — photos a partner shares into your library aren't yours unless you saved them. Save them first.
• Albums as folders, not albums — each album arrives as a folder of copies. OneDrive won't show them as albums; you'll have folders.
• Edits — you get the edited version, not the original, unless you turned on "Include original" in Takeout's options.
• Face groups, memories, search — these are Google features, not part of your photos. They don't move anywhere.

Why no service can do this for you

Until 2025, tools could connect to Google Photos and copy your library elsewhere. Google shut that door on 31 March 2025: outside apps can now only see photos you pick one by one, or photos they uploaded themselves. So there is no honest "connect both accounts and we'll move your Google Photos" service anymore — including ours. DriveFerry moves Google Drive files (documents, folders, everything in Drive), and we'd rather tell you plainly that Google Photos has to go through Takeout.

If your Drive is part of the move too, that part we can run for you, with a report at the end. Early access is open, and the founder list gets 50% off at launch.

Before you delete anything in Google Photos

Keep the Google account alive for at least 30 days. Open OneDrive, check a few albums, check the dates on a handful of screenshots, and only then decide. And read these seven things first:

7 things to know before moving files between cloud services →

Common questions