

Google Takeout: Download your data from Picasa, Contacts, Buzz and Profiles - ch0wn
https://www.google.com/takeout/

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kylec
There are some serious problems with their Picasa export (possibly others, I
only tried Picasa). First, a good number of my photos simply didn't download -
I only got 1328 of my 2283 photos. Second, I uploaded all my photos at their
native sizes to Picasa, but the photos I got from Takeout were resized to
around 1200x1600. However, my originals are kept by Google and I can download
them individually through the Picasa interface, so they must be resizing them
specifically for the download.

The first strikes me as a bug that will eventually be fixed, but the second
seems to be an unfortunate design choice - Google can save money on bandwidth
if they downsize your photos, and if you know that what you get when you
export is downsized you're less likely to do it. I feel sorry, though, for
people whose only copy of some photos is in Picasa.

~~~
brown9-2
Is the amount of bandwidth saved by Google in doing this really going to be
all that cost efficient? I would chalk this up to a bug or poor design choice
as well rather than something with the bottom-line in mind.

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hebejebelus
There are things I would _really_ like from google - where I fit in to their
adsense categories, for example. (I'm not sure whether this data is anonymised
or not)

I just downloaded this data, all the data they would give me. I got my email
address and my name back. I also got a handful of contacts. I consider myself
a reasonably heavy google[-owned projects] user.

This, for the most part, is useless information.

What I would like is exactly what they would give to the government
(obviously, after confirming fifty times that it's actually me they're giving
it to).

Regardless of all that, I think this should boost Google's image. Very smart
to focus on social privacy, when that's Facebook's one downfall.

~~~
wmf
Are you looking for <http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/> ?

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jncraton
Why not give me a nice big mbox file with all my emails in it as well? That's
honestly the main thing that Google has that I care about preserving.

~~~
ch0wn
Shouldn't that be possible via IMAP?

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albertzeyer
Afaik, not really. Mails in GMail are not represented in a hierarchical tree
structure and thus don't directly match the IMAP protocol.

~~~
ammmir
IMAP can be used to download the raw message bodies. hierarchical structure
(aka threading) comes from the parsing of Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To
MIME headers contained in the bodies.

~~~
albertzeyer
I mean directories. GMails IMAP interface maps each tag to a directory but
that is not exactly the same. Esp. when your extracting algorithm doesn't know
about this, you end up with a lot of duplicates.

~~~
thwarted
So only download the All Mail folder into a single mbox.

~~~
albertzeyer
Then you miss the tagging information.

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afhof
Unfortunately it is still pretty hard to get any of your Google Talk chat logs
out. Most of the solutions are from years ago and no longer work. I ended up
being able to download an sqlite database of my chat logs using Google Gears.

~~~
beck5
Do you find them useful for reference or just feel safe having them?

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ori_b
I log everything because quite often it is useful to refer back to them.

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AlecSchueler
It might defeat the benefits of using the web interface for you, but you could
connect to Talk using Pidgin, or something similar.

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ori_b
I already do. I prefer Pidgin's UI anyways. (Also, the chats are logged by
gmail anyways, so if I want to use Google's search for the logs over grep, I
still have that option)

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lhnz
Releasing this at the same time as Google+ is a very smart PR move. :)

~~~
jedc
I would guess it's more everyone making launch deadlines before the end of the
quarter!

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lurker19
Why is this separate from the Data Liberation Front?

Another 20% project destined to be a quick PR hit and never actually become
usable enough to fulfill its promise of giving the user control over his own
data?

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kylemaxwell
I gave this a spin as well and was fairly happy with it, at least as far as it
goes. Takeout has a fairly limited scope, but of course the DLF (greatest
project name EVAR) has done more good than just this.

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albertzeyer
It doesn't seem to work for me. I tried to create an archive for all my data
and it just shows 'Files: 0, Size: 0B' on everything.

Edit: Tried a second time and it works now.

But as it was said, the most important thing I miss is a way to extract the
mails (in the way they are stored in GMail with all tags and other meta
information).

~~~
pyre
What meta information does GMail have that you can't get from downloading your
emails over POP or IMAP (other than tags)?

~~~
albertzeyer
Tags are the most important thing for me. If this is not possible, any
extracting is really not worth it for me.

To extract tags right now, you could search in every other directory (and
assume that this are all available tags) for the same mail and get by that
error-prone algorithm all tags of a message.

Maybe also missing is some meta information about the spam level and/or
importance level. And meta information why Google thinks that some message is
important to me (on the web interface, it sometimes shows a reason like
'because of recent conversation with this person' or so).

And maybe more. I would just like to get everything.

~~~
pyre

      > et by that error-prone algorithm all tags of a message.
    

Shouldn't be error-prone. All your emails should have a Message-Id: header.
While not impossible, I've never heard of issues due to Message-Id
collisions...

You could write something to sync your emails to a database, then when it
encounters an email in a 'folder' it can just add it to the email as a tag. I
don't know of anything that currently does this, but it's not like the
technology (and information) isn't there.

    
    
      > And meta information why Google thinks that some
      > message is important to me (on the web interface,
      > it sometimes shows a reason like 'because of recent
      > conversation with this person' or so).
    

Of what use is this outside of Google, though? IIRC Google is the only one
doing something like this. It's not like you could import that meta
information into Outlook/Thunderbird/Mail.app.

~~~
albertzeyer
Error-prone because it adds stupid complexity and many additional steps for
just getting some simple information which Google probably has stored already
along with the mail. With additional complexity, you always get further things
in your algorithm which could go wrong. Such unnecessary complexity should
always be avoided.

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nodata
This is broken for me. I choose "Contacts and Circles", then "Create archive".
It then fails. I try again, it fails a bit later. Again: it succeeds with no
obvious way to download the file. I try again and get "Download quota
exceeded". The file which I haven't downloaded isn't even a megabyte.

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beefman
Great, now let me get my Reader stuff.

Edit: And put the buzz stuff in some sort of timeline. I guess this raises the
question of an archival format for modern web "experiences"...

~~~
zbanks
Buzz includes shared items/notes in Reader. You can always export (& import)
your subscriptions: <http://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export?hl=en>
.

Also, although there isn't any manifest or timeline _file_ , each .html file
for Buzz has a last modified date that corresponds to when it was created. In
addition, in the file itself, it has a timestamp.

This seems more than reasonable. Sure an XML/JSON timeline might be nice, but
it wouldn't be human-readable either.

~~~
beefman
Reader shared items only appear in buzz if you've "connected" reader to buzz.
I don't have it connected because people I know hate seeing stuff in buzz
they've seen elsewhere.

Plus, I've got hundreds of reader items I shared before buzz existed. I don't
think google even keeps them though they imply that they do.

I just used "save web page, complete" in firefox on my buzz feed and got
something better than what the takeout buzz download gave me.

The Cloud^TM - because all filesystems should be stochastic. Is my file there?
Maybe!! We don't know, honestly. Your query timed out? I guess the system
doesn't know either. Try again later!

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tluyben2
Voting for mailbox takeout!

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barista
What use is an exported that that cannot be easily imported to other system.
Google should provide connectors to other popular tools e.g. export data from
picasa to flickr or smugmug etc. similarly export to hotmail, yahoo mail etc.

~~~
hboon
I haven't looked at the exported format, but I assume it's readable. But
surely other than that, import tools for other services should do their share
of the work.

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1010011010
Anti-data-lockin FTW

~~~
intellection
+1

~~~
intellection
Besides not understanding hate/low value towards parents' Anti-Data-Lock-in
post (On-point with "Avoiding vendor lock-in for computer software":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in>), I am unsatisfied and
frustrated my high-five post gets downvotes. With a certain humility. It's
like getting pushed over for waving your hands (or voting).

I passionately support freeing data because of my work and info I want to
share freely being archived|trapped away as proprietary property/formats.

I hope a little phrase like Anti-Data-Lock-in can transcend copyright and
privacy. Maybe a meme for not losing your data/yourself, by being locked out.

