If you’ve ever graduated from college or switched schools, you know that sinking feeling when you realize years of photos, documents, and emails are locked inside an account you’re about to lose access to. Google has been chipping away at that problem for a while – and now, it just made one of the biggest moves yet for students and educators. As of May 1, 2026, Google Takeout Transfer officially supports Google Photos for Education users, meaning students can now move their photos and videos out of their school-issued accounts and into their personal Google accounts without downloading a single zip file.

This might sound like a small quality-of-life update, but it’s actually a pretty significant one if you’ve spent any time in the education technology world. Before this change, Google Takeout Transfer already let students copy their Google Drive files and Gmail messages to a personal account – a genuinely useful feature when graduation season rolls around and IT departments start preparing to wipe accounts. But photos were always the awkward outlier. Google Photos and Google Drive, while sharing the same storage pool, have functioned as entirely separate products since July 2019, which meant photos couldn’t just tag along with a Drive migration. Students who wanted to save their photos had to jump through a series of hoops – downloading them manually, re-uploading them elsewhere, or getting creative with partner account workarounds on Reddit. It was messy, and for anyone with years of school photos, it was genuinely stressful.

Now, the path is much cleaner. When students head over to takeout.google.com/transfer, they’ll see a new toggle for Google Photos alongside the existing options for Drive and Gmail. The transfer copies everything – photos, videos, and albums that the user owns – directly to their personal Google account. It works the same way the Drive and Gmail transfers have always worked: files are copied rather than moved, so nothing disappears from the school account during the process, and users get an email notification once the transfer completes, which can take up to a week depending on the volume of content. The main thing to keep in mind is storage – students will need enough free space in their personal Google account to accommodate everything being transferred.

For school and university IT administrators, the rollout comes with some important nuances. The feature is off by default and needs to be enabled at the Organizational Unit (OU) level in the Google Admin console. That means individual schools and districts get to decide whether and when to make this available to their students – a practical design choice, given how carefully institutions have to manage data policies and external sharing settings. In fact, one of the most common reasons the transfer tool fails for Drive content has nothing to do with the tool itself – it’s because the institution’s external sharing policies are set too strictly, which blocks the temporary file-sharing mechanism that makes transfers possible. Admins enabling Photos transfer should double-check those settings before announcing anything to students.

The update is rolling out immediately for both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains, and it applies to Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus tiers. Google says this is just the first step in what it’s framing as a broader migration path for Photos data in Education. Later in 2026, the company plans to introduce new Photos management and bulk-deletion tools directly inside the admin console. Those tools will give administrators better visibility into which students have already migrated their data, and they’ll also allow institutions to proactively manage Photos content to free up pooled Drive storage – a particularly valuable capability for schools operating on tight storage budgets.

That last point deserves a bit more context. Google Workspace for Education accounts operate on a shared, pooled storage model, which means everyone at an institution – students, staff, and faculty – draws from the same overall storage quota. When thousands of students accumulate years of photos and videos in their school accounts and never migrate them before leaving, that content keeps consuming storage space long after those students are gone. Schools typically suspend accounts sometime after graduation – anywhere from 30 to 180 days depending on institutional policy – but during that window, storage costs keep ticking. Better admin tools to track and manage Photos data could meaningfully help schools reclaim that space and reduce unnecessary costs.

For students, the practical takeaway is straightforward: if you’re graduating, switching schools, or just know you’ll eventually lose access to your school account, now is a great time to start thinking about a transfer. The process requires a personal Google account with enough storage to receive everything, so if you’ve accumulated several gigabytes of memories, you may want to check your personal storage situation first and consider upgrading if needed. Google’s own transfer interface even surfaces a banner offering a Google AI storage plan to help users get enough space before they hit “Start Transfer“. Once you initiate the transfer, it runs in the background and you’ll get an email confirmation when it’s done – no manual downloading, no re-uploading, and no worrying about whether your albums survived the process intact.

It’s a welcome change, and honestly, one that’s long overdue. Photos are arguably more personal and irreplaceable than any document in Google Drive – the birthday parties, late-night study sessions, graduation ceremonies, and all the small moments in between. The fact that they were left out of the transfer workflow for so long was a real gap in Google’s education data portability story. This update closes it in a meaningful way, and the promise of better admin tools later this year suggests Google is treating this as an ongoing commitment rather than a one-time checkbox.