Google is rolling out a new initiative that will make it easier to transfer data from Google Photos to iCloud Photos, the company announced Wednesday. To achieve this, the Mountain View tech giant has partnered with Apple to bring support for iCloud Photos to Google’s data portability initiative — Google Takeout — allowing media to be seamlessly transferred to iCloud Photos without being deleted from Google’s library and requiring the data to be downloaded.
Apple-Google Partnership
According to a blog after Through the Data Transfer Initiative, a forum that develops open-source tools for easily transferring data between devices, Google and Apple have teamed up to introduce a new tool powered by the open-source Data Transfer Project (DTP) technology stack. The feature is expected to roll out to users next week.
Both Apple and Google’s support forums now have details about transferring media from Google Photos to iCloud Photos. According to For 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 permissions, media visibility permissions, and data with Google.
The photos and videos will appear in a new “Import from Google” album in the Photos app. The media will also include the date of the transfer. If some photos or videos are missing, they will be available in a folder in Drive with the same name. Once the data transfer is complete, Apple will receive a confirmation via email. If iCloud Photos is disabled for some reason during the process, only the already transferred media will be visible on the Apple device, the company said.
Only photo and video file transfers are 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 MP4 and MOV video formats. Those photos and videos that cannot be transferred to iCloud Photos will be moved to iCloud Drive.
This step is part of the Data Transfer Initiative launched by Apple, Google and Meta. The goal is to improve data portability by allowing users to transfer their data on the web across devices.
