How to Directly Transfer Your Pictures From Google Photos to iCloud

Soon you'll no longer have to download photos to send them from Google Photos to iCloud.

Say goodbye to downloading your entire photo library: Google and Apple are working together to allow users to directly transfer photos from Google Photos to iCloud, following a similar move from Apple in 2021. It’s a rare move of collaboration from the companies, and is part of the wider Data Transfer Project, an open-source project backed by several big tech companies that works to make data more portable between platforms.

Both companies posted support articles to their site explaining the process, which isn’t available quite yet. Apple’s article goes into a bit more detail on restrictions, pointing out that the service will launch in 240 countries and regions but won’t work for child accounts or Managed Apple ID accounts. Enabling Advanced Data Protection will also keep you from accessing Google Photos transfers to iCloud.

To transfer photos from Google Photos to Apple iCloud once it becomes available, first go to the transfer photos view of Google Takeout, the company’s service for generating backups of everything from your Google Drive content to your Gmail contacts. 

Under Choose the data you want to copy, you’ll see the Google Photos logo. Click All photo albums included under the logo to narrow down the photos to be transferred, or keep it as-is to transfer all of them. Click the blue Continue button in the lower-right corner. In the Move to: dropdown menu, select Apple - iCloud Photos and sign into your Apple ID in the webpage that pops up. Click on Allow in Apple’s interface, then on Google’s interface, and finish the process by clicking Agree and continue.

It’s a somewhat laborious process, but it’s a bit more convenient in the long run than fully syncing your iCloud and Google Photos accounts. Google Takeout is a one-time, one-way transfer, so using this method means you won’t have to worry about new iCloud photos accidentally copying over to Google Drive and clogging up your storage space.

There’s no word yet on when transfers will be live, but be sure to set aside some time once they are. Google Takeout can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to send everything over, depending on how many photos you want to share.