Importing photos from Google photos to LR Classic

Report · Jan 16, 2021

Hello, I'm on a Mac but don't use Apple Photos. I use Google photos as my backup of my iPhone photos. For some reason, I can't upload to LR using my phone (iPhone 11) so I want to download photos from Google photos and import them that way. Google creates a ZIP file of the photos I want to download and when I unzip them, some of them are converted to jpg and some stay as HEIC (Apple photos). My "live" is always on so I also get a MOV file. I'm getting errors when I import the HEIC files. Any ideas? Thank you! Vicki

Report · Jan 16, 2021

I believe Google (local files) can be set to using Google Smart Sync to either local or Online only.

I think i'd be correct in stating that you must have a local copy of Google installed and then choose how the above Sync can work for you.

But that's a little Google plan-specific also.

Would that be relevant to your issue Victoria?

Report · Jan 17, 2021

Thanks Tony. I appreciate your response. I use Google drive to back up certain folders and files on my computer. But I use Google Photos to back up my Apple photos on my phone. My problem is downloading the photos from Google Photo into Lightroom Classic. I'm going to have to do more research into how to do this without the error messages I'm getting.

Report · Jan 17, 2021

Ok, the first thing you need to be aware of is that LrC (classic) requires that a copy of the original file resides locally on the computer. I do not know if there is a way for LrC to download the images from your Google storage.

Just a thought if you have access to LrC on your computer you can also install Lr Mobile on your iPhone and import your photos from the iPhone and they will sync to the Adobe Cloud storage and then sync to LrC.

Regards, Denis: iMac 27” mid-2015, macOS 11.7.10 Big Sur; 2TB SSD, 24 GB Ram, GPU 2 GB; LrC 12.5,; Lr 6.5, PS 24.7,; ACR 15.5,; (also Laptop Win 11, ver 24H2, LrC 15.0.1, PS 27.0; ) Camera Oly OM-D E-M1.

Report · Jan 17, 2021

Thank you DdeGannes, When I download the photos from Google Photo, it does put a copy of the file on my computer, so that's not a problem with LrC. But, I do like your idea about using LrMobile on my phone. I got around the Google Photos problem by using my iCloud account. All my photos are also backed up there, so I'm importing them into LrC from iCloud.