[Software] How to migrate photos from Google Photos to a NAS

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Now that Google photos does not have unlimited storage, you can choose to subscribe to one of the cloud storage services to make backup copies of your photos, some can share them with more people and others also offer you additional services. Although the best place to store them is on your own NAS. In this guide we are going to see how to migrate photos from Google Photos to your NAS so that you don't have to worry about space, just about what is free on your hard drive.

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You can choose to choose a paid cloud storage service, even Google allows you to buy more space that you can use for the services it offers just by having a Gmail account. You can see the different plans offered by the multiple companies dedicated to this type of storage that is accessible from any location with a device connected to the internet.

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But the best solution without a doubt is to opt for personal storage, if you have a NAS you can host all your photos on your own server and you can also make it accessible as if it were your personal cloud. QNAP or Synology have applications to do this easily, even in the cheapest models like the QNAP TS-230 that gave such good results in our review.

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In addition, once the photos are copied, we can also synchronize them with cloud services from the NAS itself.

Download photos from Google Photos
First, we will have to have all the photos that we have in Google Photos, we will have to download them to our computer to be able to copy them to the hard drive of the NAS. Let's see how to do this quickly, since we have an extensive step-by-step guide to download photos from Google Photos to your PC.

We enter the Google Photos website and identify ourselves if we have not already done so.
We click on the cogwheel in the upper right.
We are looking to export data that is a little further down.
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We click on create a backup and it will take us to Google Takeout.
TakeOut is the Google tool that will allow us to request all the data, in this case the photos, from Google Photos.

We select Export once, since we are going to download the photos only once.
Below we choose the compression and the file size with which we are going to request the download. Keep in mind that if the photos are larger than the selected size, they will be divided into files of that size.

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Now we just have to click on create export. In a few minutes (or even days) the request will be available.
When Google informs us that it is now available for download, we will only have to click on the links that Google has left us in our e-mail to have all the photos on the PC.

Copy your photos to the NAS to have them on all your devices
Once we have unzipped all the photos and have them in a folder, it is time to copy them to our NAS. We can do it through the Web environment offered by the main brands or directly if we have it as a network drive we can copy them with the Windows file explorer.

The NAS have specific folders where to save the images and then manage them intelligently with the software they offer. We must copy, whatever the method, the photographs to this folder which will generally be called Photos or Photos if it is not translated.

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With the photos in the appropriate folder we can make use of these specific applications for managing photographs and we can also view them on mobile devices, tablets, on TV or on another computer over the internet.

To upload photos if we have a Synology NAS we can use the tool that is available to download Synology Photo Station Uploader or use the Photo Station or Photos application itself, depending on the version of DSM we have, to manage and manage the photos. QNAP has the QuMagie application to manage the photos, from here we can upload them automatically through its web interface.

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To copy your photos to the NAS we must follow these steps:
We open the web environment through the local address that we have assigned, it is usually of the type 192.168.1.X: XXXX, where the Xs are changed by the last number of the IP address followed by the colon and the port.