Google is introducing a new initiative that makes it easier to transfer data from Google Photos to iCloud Photos, the company announced Wednesday. To achieve this, the Mountain View-based tech giant has partnered with Apple to provide support for iCloud Photos in Google's data portability initiative, Google Takeout, which enables a seamless transfer of media to iCloud Photos without deleting – those from the Google library that requires downloading the data. .
Apple-Google partnership
According to a blog post by the Data Transfer Initiative, a forum that develops open-source tools to facilitate data transfer between devices, Google and Apple have teamed up to introduce a new tool powered by the open-source Data Transfer Project technology ( DTP) stack. The feature is said to be rolling out to users next week.
Both the Apple and Google support forums now include details on transferring media from Google Photos to iCloud Photos. According to Apple, users will now see iCloud Photos as a destination in Google Takeout. They can then choose the data they want to transfer and share media visibility permissions with Google.
Photos and videos will appear in a new “Import from Google” album in the Photos app. The media will also carry the date of the move. If some of the photos or videos are missing, they will be available in a Drive folder with the same name. After the data transfer is complete, Apple says users will receive a confirmation email. If, for some reason, iCloud Photos is turned off during the process, only the already transferred media will be visible on the Apple device, according to the company.
Only photo and video file transfer is supported. According to Apple, other media such as Motion Photos, Live Photos, or Memories cannot be transferred. It supports image formats such as JPEG, HEIC or PNG, and video formats MP4 and MOV. Photos and videos that cannot be transferred to iCloud Photos are moved to iCloud Drive.
This move is part of the data transfer initiative introduced by Apple, Google and Meta. It aims to improve data portability by allowing users to transfer their data to the web across devices.
