Easily transfer photos from your old Google Photos account to a new one, without having to upload them again.
Ditching an old Google Account for a new one is not without consequences. If in the case of emails, Gmail makes it quite easy to manage your old inbox from the new one, this is unfortunately not the case for all associated Google services.
Among the most problematic, Google Photos. The photo and video backup service, which syncs across your mobile devices, officially doesn’t offer any option to transfer all content from one account to another.
The simplest solution, a priori, is to download all the photos and videos from the first account, before uploading them again to the second. This option is entirely possible and will require going through the dedicated Google Takeout service to request the download of your data, and more particularly those concerning Google Photos.
Download your data with Google Takeout (Free)
This manipulation may take a considerable amount of time if you have several tens of thousands of images, and especially if your Internet connection is starving. Luckily, there is a fairly simple solution to implement, by diverting a function usually reserved for integrated content sharing, to Google Photos.
1. Share your photo library
Sign in to the original Google Account Photo Library, which you want to transfer to your new account. Open the main menu, and go to Google Photos Settings.
Then enter the Shared photo libraries menu, and click Start.
Then enter the email address of your new Gmail account to share your old photo library with your new Google account, and click Next.
The next step proposes to limit access to certain photos according to a date.
If this option can be useful in the case of sharing your photo library with a third party, it is unnecessary here since you want to be able to find all the images from your old Google Photos account, in your new account. Click on Next.
A summary window appears showing the content you are about to share, from your old account to your new account. Confirm sharing by clicking Send invitation.
2. Accept the invitation
Sign in to your new Google account and go to Gmail. You should have received an invitation to access the Google Photos library in your old account.
Click Open Google Photos to access photos from your old account, on your new account.
3. Access the shared photo library
An alert window appears and indicates that you are about to access a shared photo library, that of your old Google Account.
At this point, photos and videos from your old account are visible from your new account, but are not saved to it. Click Accept to continue.
4. Save the photos to your new account
At the top of the window, click Turn on auto-save and click View these photos alongside your own.
In the dialog box that appears, check All photos and validate by clicking OK.
Thus, all the images in the library shared by your old Google Photos account will be saved to your new Google Photos library.
Depending on the number of items to transfer, wait several minutes or even hours for all the photos and videos from your old account to be saved to your new Google Photos account.
5. Reactivate automatic backup on mobile
In addition, do not forget on your smartphone to reactivate the automatic backup of the camera roll on the new Google Photos account configured. From the main menu of the application, go to Settings, then to the Backup and synchronization menu.
In Backup account, tap the old connected account and select the new account used for backup.
6. Disable sharing of the old account
Once all of your content has been successfully uploaded, go back to your old Google Photos account to turn off photo library sharing there.
Expand the main menu, enter Settings, click on the arrow of the Shared photo libraries menu to display the details, and click on Delete contact and confirm by clicking on Delete.
The content of your old Google Photos library is no longer shared with your new account, but all the photos saved in the previous step are still accessible on your new account’s photo library.
From there, all you have to do is delete your old photo library and focus on the new one.