How to transfer Google Photos to OneDrive

Every migration to OneDrive comes down to one choice. Google's own transfer service copies your library server-side, free, with no export step. A Takeout-based migration costs more effort (or a tool) but is the only kind that carries everything. Which one you need depends entirely on what's in your library:

Both start from the same place, so nothing stops you from trying the free route first on an eligible account and switching if the results disappoint. What you should not do is judge either by how the dates look in a file list; more on that trap below.

Before starting any route, look up your library's size in your Google account's storage settings and compare it honestly against your Microsoft storage. Every route on this page aborts or strands your library when OneDrive runs short mid-transfer, and three OneDrive rules surprise almost everyone:

• The 6 TB family plan is six separate silos. Microsoft 365 Family advertises 6 TB, but each person gets a fixed 1 TB. A 1.5 TB library cannot borrow a family member's spare space.
• 2 TB is the consumer ceiling. Only the primary subscriber can buy extra storage, up to 1 TB more. Beyond that, OneDrive simply isn't big enough, whatever you're willing to pay.
• Going over quota freezes your email. Microsoft pools its storage accounting, so overshooting the OneDrive limit doesn't just pause sync: Outlook.com stops sending and receiving mail until you're back under. A migration that lands you at 100% is a migration that broke your inbox.

The same terabyte also holds your PC folder backup, documents, and attachments, so leave real headroom. If your library plus everything else approaches 1 TB, decide now whether you'll buy the add-on or pick a roomier destination; our backup guide compares the cheap archive options.

Under your Google account's privacy settings, “Transfer your content” copies your photo library directly to Microsoft OneDrive (also iCloud, Flickr, or SmugMug). You authorize both accounts, Google does the work in the background, and for a few hundred gigabytes it typically finishes within hours to a couple of days. Embedded EXIF survives intact, and nothing passes through your computer.

The fine print is where libraries get hurt, because the tool transfers your original files, not your curated library. Everything Google Photos stores in its database instead of in the file itself stays behind: dates you corrected, descriptions you wrote, locations you added by hand. Live and Motion Photos arrive as still images only; the video halves are discarded. Locked Folder content, trash, and shared-album photos you never saved to your own library are skipped. And when it finishes, you get no manifest of what moved: verifying completeness means comparing folder sizes across two clouds that count bytes differently, which is no verification at all.

It's also a black box while it runs, and not always a reliable one. There is no progress view or log, and when a job fails, the only thing you receive is an email telling you to try again, with no hint of what went wrong or whether anything partially arrived. In our own runs it has failed several times in a row before eventually going through. It usually does succeed on a retry, but plan for a multi-day loop of attempts rather than a one-shot job, and count your photos at the destination before trusting the result.

Our honest take: for a library of straight-off-the-phone photos that were never edited in Google Photos, this is a good free route despite the retries, and we say so even though we sell the alternative. The more your library has been curated inside Google Photos, the more it loses in the crossing.

Google Takeout is the export that includes what the official transfer drops: every file plus a .json sidecar per photo holding the edited dates, descriptions, locations, and the capture times of photos with no EXIF of their own (screenshots, WhatsApp saves). The catch is that the sidecar data doesn't apply itself; something has to merge it back into the files.

Takeout can deliver the export archives directly into OneDrive: on the export screen, switch the delivery method to “Add to OneDrive” and the zip parts land server-to-server in a Google Download Your Data folder. Practical notes: pick 10 GB parts (the 50 GB ones fail more often and are miserable to re-run), make sure OneDrive has free space before requesting (a mid-delivery shortage aborts the hand-off), and know the export expires about a week after it's ready. One genuine OneDrive advantage: its web interface can extract zip archives server-side, which Dropbox's cannot, though very large multi-part Takeout exports can still choke it, and extraction alone doesn't fix a single date.

From here the do-it-yourself path runs like any full-fidelity migration: get the archives onto a computer, extract them (mind that Takeout's long nested folder names can breach Windows' 260-character path limit and silently stall the OneDrive sync client), run a sidecar-aware fixer such as GPTH Neo (the maintained fork of Google Photos Takeout Helper) or ExifTool with a current Takeout script (Google renamed and truncated the sidecar files in late 2024, which broke older tools, the original GPTH included), then let the OneDrive desktop app upload the repaired folders. Budget a weekend and twice your library's size in free disk.

PhotoBridge does the Takeout route cloud-to-cloud: it unpacks the split archives, merges every sidecar's date and location back into each photo's EXIF, skips the duplicate copies Takeout creates for albums, uploads the result to OneDrive organized by date, and emails you a per-file report at the end. Your laptop stays out of it.

And OneDrive gets a route nothing else here offers: PhotoBridge can read the Takeout archives straight out of your OneDrive. If you already used “Add to OneDrive” delivery (or dragged downloaded archives in), there is nothing to re-export or move; point PhotoBridge at your OneDrive and it finds them. Takeout to Google Drive works just as well as a starting point.

Full disclosure: PhotoBridge is our product, and this guide is on our site. When Google's free transfer fits your library, we said so above, and we mean it.

OneDrive is a file system with a photo view bolted on, not a photo database like Google Photos, and the difference shows in a few specific places:

Dates: the Photos view sorts by the EXIF capture date inside each file, which is exactly why the sidecar merge matters, and why a freshly unzipped library can look broken in the regular file view: extraction stamps every file with today's date, and file views sort by that. Judge your timeline in the Photos tab, not the folder list. Albums, face grouping, and location maps exist and work reasonably; search is weaker than Google's.

On your PC: Files On-Demand shows the whole library in Explorer or Finder without filling your disk. One trap for Windows users: OneDrive's PC folder backup often claims the Pictures folder, and pointing Google's or Samsung's backup software at that same folder creates dueling sync clients fighting over identical files. Keep one owner per folder.

On Samsung phones: the deep two-way sync between Samsung Gallery and OneDrive is scheduled to end on September 30, 2026. Afterwards the standard OneDrive app still backs up new camera photos one-way, but gallery edits and deletions stop mirroring to the cloud. If that sync was your reason for choosing OneDrive, factor its retirement in.