Google Takeout update could make transferring photos to iCloud a breeze
Starting next year, Google will be making it easier to transfer your user information to third-party services using its Takeout export tool.
This update comes at the tail end of an investigation by the Italian Competition Authority (AGCM), a market competition regulator. In total, there will be three new changes made to Googleâs service. Although we donât know exactly what the changes will be, the AGCM does mention a few things. Two of them will be âsupplementary solutionsâ to Google Takeout, giving people a way to export their information to âthird-party operators.â The third âcommitmentâ, as itâs referred to, will âallow direct data portability from service to service.â That last one specifically relates to moving data generated from a personâs Google Search history and YouTube.
To give some backstory, back in 2022 the AGCM alleged Google had been abusing its dominant position in the tech industry to collect âlarge amounts of [user] dataâ and putting up âobstacles to interoperabilityâ in sharing information with third parties. One of the complaints said Takeout was âextremely complicatedâ to use â something they claim was by design as it âdiscourages [people] from porting their data elsewhere.â In response, Google proposed the three features that we mentioned earlier as changes it could make to appease regulators; all of which the Authority accepted.
Expanding data portability
Regarding the direct data portability feature, 9to5Google states it sounds a lot like the Data Transfer Initiative (formerly known as the Data Transfer Project). If you donât know what that is, the Data Transfer Initiative consists of Apple, Meta, and Google coming together to expand data portability to users. The classic example, as given by 9to5Google, is imagine being able to transfer images from Google Photos to iCloud without having to manually do anything. The companies handle all the heavy lifting. This could preserve precious bandwidth while also being much faster than downloading gigabytes of content.
Itâs unknown exactly when everything in the Google Takeout update will be released, but we wonât have to wait long for the direct data portability tool. The tech giant told the Authority the feature will officially launch sometime during âthe first quarter of 2024.â However, we might see it even sooner as third-party platforms can test an early version of the tool âsix months before its actual release.â Possibly by October, at the earliest.
If you donât want to wait until next year for the Google Takeout upgrade, check out TechRadarâs list of the best data migration tools for 2023.