Facebook will release a tool enabling its users to transfer their photos directly to Google Photos. It will be available initially in Ireland and by 2020 in the rest of the world.
“For nearly a decade, we’ve allowed people to download their information from Facebook,” says Steve Satterfield, Director of Privacy and Public Policy at Facebook. “The photo transfer tool we started implementing today is based on the code developed through our participation in the Open Source Data Transfer Project.
The above project includes participants such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Twitter. Facebook assures that they will start with Google Photos, but that other services could be integrated in the future. The company is testing the tool in Ireland and will polish it based on user feedback.
This tool is useful for Google Photos users who do not automatically back up images from their mobile phone. If you’re a Facebook and Google Photos user who backs up your photos, it’s likely that most of your photos published on the social network are already backed up in the Google service.