How to Download Shared Albums From Google Photos

Someone shared a Google Photos album with you — family vacation, wedding photos, your kid's school events. Those photos show up in your library, but when you try to export them with Google Takeout, they're not there. Takeout only exports photos you uploaded. Shared albums are silently skipped.

Why Google Takeout Skips Shared Albums

Google Takeout exports data that belongs to your account. Photos that someone else shared with you technically belong to their account — you just have viewing access. So when Takeout bundles your Google Photos data, shared photos are excluded.

This is a problem for anyone trying to leave Google Photos or create a local backup. You might have hundreds or thousands of photos in shared albums that you consider part of your library. Wedding photos your photographer shared, family albums your parents maintain, trip photos from friends — all invisible to Takeout.

The workaround people suggest is to "save" shared photos to your own library first, then run Takeout again. But that means manually selecting photos across dozens of shared albums, waiting for Google to copy them, and hoping the metadata survives the transfer. For large shared collections this is impractical.

The 500-Photo Download Limit

Google Photos does have a built-in download button. Select photos, click download, and you get a zip file. The catch: you can only select and download 500 photos at a time. For a shared album with 2,000 wedding photos, that's four rounds of manual selecting, downloading, and extracting.

Worse, the downloaded photos often lose their EXIF metadata — dates, GPS locations, and descriptions get stripped. You end up with a pile of files dated "today" instead of when they were actually taken.

Download Shared Albums With Snapback

Snapback is a free Chrome extension that downloads your Google Photos library directly from your browser — including every shared album. It downloads all shared albums at once alongside your own photos. No manual selecting, no 500-photo cap, no Takeout export to wait for.

How it works

1. Install Snapback from the Chrome Web Store — it's free and takes seconds.
2. Open photos.google.com and click the Snapback icon in your browser toolbar.
3. Switch to the Album tab and click "Shared with me" to select every album others have shared with you. (There's also a "Shared by me" button if you want albums you shared with others.)
4. Click "Start Backup" — all selected shared albums download at once, organized into YYYY/MM date folders. Pause and resume anytime.

Snapback downloads everything at original quality with metadata saved as JSON sidecar files. One difference from your own photos: you can't mass-delete shared photos from Google after downloading, since they belong to someone else's account.

Shared Album Download Methods Compared

Fix Metadata After Downloading

Snapback saves metadata as JSON sidecar files alongside your photos — the same format Google Takeout uses. These contain dates, GPS locations, and descriptions, but they're not embedded in the photo files themselves.

If you plan to import your photos into Apple Photos, Lightroom, a NAS, or any other photo manager, run them through Metadata Fixer first. It reads the JSON files and writes the metadata back into your photos so dates and locations work everywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions