Google has given more controls to people who use Takeout, its data portability tool to export copies of their data from more than 70 Google products, including Gmail, Drive and Photos. Now, the users can transfer specific albums, rather than the entire library. Google said millions of photos have already been transferred since it began to roll out this feature.
People use Takeout for lots of different reasons: backing up their data, getting a bird's eye view of what's in their account, or moving their data to a different service without first downloading it onto a device.
"We first supported the direct transfer of data archives in 2016, and since then have launched a scheduled export service, as well as the ability to transfer photos directly from Google Photos to Flickr and Microsoft OneDrive," Greg Fair, Co-founder, Data Transfer Project, said in a blog post on Monday.
Google and the Data Transfer Project recently submitted comments to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about data portability. Today, there is an average of more than two million exports per month from Takeout, with more than 200 billion files exported in 2019.
"The principles that underpin Takeout also apply to the Data Transfer Project (DTP), an industry-wide effort that we founded and continue to lead with Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple," Google said.
Takeout is an open-source data portability platform that enables people to move their data directly from one service provider to another. This can help people test a new service, or move data if they have slow or metered connections, like a mobile device in an area without access to high-speed broadband.
In 2018, Google gave the first public demo of the first prototype of the Data Transfer Project. Last fall, it launched the first publicly-available direct transfer built with Data Transfer Project code, enabling people to move their Google Photos library to Flickr.
"With the addition of Microsoft OneDrive as a destination earlier this year, and the announcement of a photo album selection feature, we're continuing our commitment to making portability more practical and widely available," Google said.
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