[robertlacok]

There's an important thing that is easy to miss if you just use a Google Takeout for the export – your Shared albums will only contain pictures that you yourself added!

I went through this journey a few months ago, and it's pretty hard to catch because those albums will appear in the export, and they are not empty, so you don't expect that they are partial exports. The way to export them was going one by one in the regular Google Photos app, and downloading each album as a ZIP – that way you get pictures also from other contributors to that album.

Funnily enough, I also experienced some rate limiting and had to wait a few minutes after every 6-7 albums.

My end goal was importing the Takeout into Apple Photos library locally stored on my Mac. Some other steps I had to take were:

- Fixing the metadata [0] so they showed up with a correct date

- Importing albums first, and the "Stream" (a folder per year) second, because otherwise the deduplication would mean the pictures already in the stream wouldn't get added to an album.

[0] https://metadatafixer.com/

[albertzeyer]

In a Google Photos shared photo album, there is the button to "save photos [to your library]". I would expect that you need to click that in order to have those pictures being contained in your Google Takeout and your library. Did you do that?

[mholt]

Correct, if you "Save" shared photos to your account then they start using your storage quota and you can download them in Takeout.

[kevincox]

> going one by one in the regular Google Photos app, and downloading each album as a ZIP

But be careful here. Some files will only be available at reduced quality and have all metadata stripped (even if the owner has elected to share it and it is visible in the web UI). The only way to get the original seems to be to contact the original uploader.