It appears Google Takeout now works properly. At least it is working now for me, when it didn't before.
It appears Google Takeout now works properly. At least it is working now for me, when it didn't before.
Previously for me it created a 34+ GB archive that contained ridiculous numbers of redundant images, as many as 30 copies of the same image, and often they weren't even my images. I couldn't sift my way through the subset I downloaded to make any sense of it, and I didn't have the bandwidth to download all 34+ GB, especially knowing it was mostly duplicate photos that weren't mine. I was sure I had nowhere near that much of my own data in G+.
Today, after Google updated the Google+ Shutdown FAQ which included a link to Takeout, I ran Takeout and got just 1.5 GB. I downloaded it and it seems to contain exactly what I would expect. All my posts and photos, in and outside of communities, with nothing obviously duplicated, and nobody else's photos. It does not organize posts by Collection like the Friends+Me exporter does, but it includes some photo comments that the Friends+Me exporter doesn't seem to capture. It also doesn't provide export to Wordpress or Blogger or any other formats.
So for my needs, which is to preserve 3 specific Collections and throw away everything else, a combination of Friends+Me to capture the specific Collections and export to Wordpress, plus Takeout to fill in some of the things missed by F+M, should cover all my needs.
It's sad that Takeout never really worked properly in the first place and there was no communication from Google about it, but now it looks like they've finally fixed it.
Previously for me it created a 34+ GB archive that contained ridiculous numbers of redundant images, as many as 30 copies of the same image, and often they weren't even my images. I couldn't sift my way through the subset I downloaded to make any sense of it, and I didn't have the bandwidth to download all 34+ GB, especially knowing it was mostly duplicate photos that weren't mine. I was sure I had nowhere near that much of my own data in G+.
Today, after Google updated the Google+ Shutdown FAQ which included a link to Takeout, I ran Takeout and got just 1.5 GB. I downloaded it and it seems to contain exactly what I would expect. All my posts and photos, in and outside of communities, with nothing obviously duplicated, and nobody else's photos. It does not organize posts by Collection like the Friends+Me exporter does, but it includes some photo comments that the Friends+Me exporter doesn't seem to capture. It also doesn't provide export to Wordpress or Blogger or any other formats.
So for my needs, which is to preserve 3 specific Collections and throw away everything else, a combination of Friends+Me to capture the specific Collections and export to Wordpress, plus Takeout to fill in some of the things missed by F+M, should cover all my needs.
It's sad that Takeout never really worked properly in the first place and there was no communication from Google about it, but now it looks like they've finally fixed it.
Oh, that's good to hear that it seems like they've fixed the duplicates issue I reported through several channels? I'll request a new Takeout too and will report back my findings!
ReplyDeletePing Edward Morbius Gideon Rosenblatt
Ok, now I will give it a try too. I was hesitating because I'd downloaded about 1/4 of my things using the G+ Exporter and after hearing of the Captch problem, I held off trying it again. Since a fix of sorts was announced a few days ago, I am getting ready to try it again.
ReplyDeleteSo, I'll report back as well. Thanks Alan.
Thanks, Alan! I'll give it another go. I thought it was pretty ridiculous to get 14-16 2GB files... :o
ReplyDeleteAre there any identity symbol/words pertaining to Google+ on Posts taken via Takeout, Please ?
ReplyDeleteThanks with Regards
Interesting. My takeout download was 100gb. I’ll try again.
ReplyDeleteJust tried not working for me the first two or three pages then an error messages ,,at 5he end of download ..
ReplyDeleteMy experience - and wants - are very similar. I did the huge multiple takeouts and found years of trees interwoven with folders of mostly images &/or .json files, labeled as images, plusses, albums, collections, etc., but unless you took the whole of the box of puzzle pieces and invested a lot of effort, there's no way many of us could, or beyond the return.
ReplyDeleteSo with a goal of preserving any photos I posted uniquely to collections or albums in Google-land, and maybe some souvenirs. But some of the high res photos in 8 different folders (where they got shared, plussed, whatever), made for huge data and redundancy. Anyone with lots of photo dupes might use what I used, "PhotoSweeper". I just separated out all the .jpegs (by "type" in Mac finder, or Explorer), and it scanned through and let me pick just one to keep (or more if they were part of complete pages I wanted t keep).
Anyway, sorry to be a "broken record" (how's that for self-dating?), but... it's good to be busy (or done) prioritizing "what's next" and what and who to hold on to - and then settle down and await the bang, as we adjust to new patterns and watch other displaced refugees, late in having an exit plan, mass migrating to MeWe, Pluspora*s, and other. Already happening, easy to see.
[Cue up Doors: This is the End]
Use LifeCloud to import all your Google+ communities, posts, and collections using the data importer:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.lifecloud.site/GooglePlusDataSync
A couple imported communities/collections:
https://www.lifecloud.site/shared/component/30053?entryId=31405
lifecloud.site - Angels - Sara d - Folder by Sara d - LifeCloud
Thanks for this. I've been sitting on the 11 zipped GB Takeout folder I originally created, which seemed excessive. All I really want to make sure I save are the photos (because I lost more than a few of what I posted here in the big computer crash last year). Going to run the new version this weekend.
ReplyDeletePat Kight if you're only interested in photos, you could also go to https://get.google.com/albumarchive and download the individual albums you are interested in. (Though depending on your amount of albums, this could be a time consuming task).
ReplyDeleteThe Takeout of Posts is much, much better. But it's still broken in interesting ways. And I've still got broken images in a few of the posts that point at sub-directories of the Photos directory that don't exist.
ReplyDeleteThe big problems I had of duplicate images, other people's images and images with bad extensions seem to have been solved. The zip is now 15Mb instead of 1.5Gb !
My experiences: plus.google.com - Dramatically improved experience with Google Data Takeout While previous expo...
ReplyDeleteIt indeed is a lot smaller, and duplicates seem to be removed, but unfortunately it looks like I'm also missing some other, unique files which used to be in the archive. I haven't yet tried to match them to posts.
I'll have to do further analysis to be certain about it, and to see which files I'm actually missing...
So far it looks like that photos from shared albums might be missing... For instance, all the images from plus.google.com - MSX Software: Continued Took a bunch of quick photographs of the various #MS... seem to be missing in my latest archive...
ReplyDeleteThere definitely seems to be something wonky...
Julian Bond do you see any pattern in the files you are missing?
Julian Bond I haven't examined everything, but at least some of the posts in my HTML export with broken images are simply pointing at the wrong directory. The HTML looks for them in "Photos from posts" but the photos are actually in "Miscellaneous Photos".
ReplyDeleteI think what's happening is that photo albums that were shared before 2015 were moved automatically to Google Photos. And that's where they appear in Album Archive. But in the post they're still pointing at some intermediate G+ album. So when takeout deconstructs this, it points at a ../Photos/Photos from posts/$ALBUM directory that doesn't exist. It should just point at the photos album and/or download the album from Photos.
ReplyDeleteI've got several examples of this, all from old posts. Posts from late last year with photos attached are working correctly.
ps. not having notifications at the moment is a bitch.
Takeout.G+Streams.ActivityLog is still horrible. 4 VERY BIG files each with minimal formatting and with comment and post run together.
ReplyDelete+1s on comments
+1s on posts
Comments
Poll Votes
7 years of comments mashed together into a single file. SRSLY?
I last tried Takeout to export my G+ stream (and nothing else) in December, and, after maybe 12 hours of processing, got on the order of 30+ 2GB archives (plus a spectacularly vague error message about problems occurring during the export). I just ran it again, and it's already done -- and produced a single ~350MB ZIP file.
ReplyDeleteThanx for posting this. I'd given up on getting anything intelligible from takeout
ReplyDeleteI requested a new Data Takeout earlier today. It's incomplete (probably missing only a few contents, though I've not explored). Total size is 553 MB, vs. 15.5 GB from my previous attempt.
ReplyDeleteThis is a huge improvement, and represents only a modest addition over the 440 MB or so of post text (JSON files) in the original archive. I suspect that content has also been reduced.
It was terrible doing business with the G+ data takeout team, for reasons almost certainly out of their direct control, but it appears they may have delivered.
I consider this a win.
Julian Bond just found all my photos, including ones in posts, in a Drive folder that much have been auto-saving from Google Photos. FWIW
ReplyDelete