Selfhosted

There's no financial incentive for them to make is easy to leave Google. Takeout only exists to comply with regulations (e.g. digital markets act), and as usual, they're doing the bare minimum to not get sued.

Honestly I thought you were going to bitch about them separating your metadata from the photos and you then having to remerge them with a special tool to get them to work with any other program.

I know it’s not ideal, but if you can afford it, you could rent a VPS in a cloud provider for a week or two, and do the download from Google Takeout on that, and then use sync or similar to copy the files to your own server.

Google takeout is there so they are technically compliant with rules that say you must be able to download your personal data, but they make it so inconvenient to use that practically it's almost impossible to download it. Google photos isn't a backup service so much as a way for Google to hold your photos hostage until you start paying for higher amounts of storage. And by the time you need that storage, Google takeout download has become impractical.

It doesn't have an option to split it?

When I did my Google takeout to delete all my pics from Google photos there was an option to split in like "one zip every 2gb"

I think this is a bit unfair. Most Google Takeout requests are fulfilled in seconds or minutes. Obviously collating 100GB of photos into a zip takes time.

And it's not googles fault you have internet issues: even a fairly modest 20Mbps internet connection can do 50GB in 6h. If you have outages that's on your ISP not Google. As others have said, have it download to a VPS or Dropbox etc then sync it from there. Or call your ISP and tell them to sort your line out, I've had 100℅ uptime on my VDSL copper line for over 2 years.

I was able to use Google Takeout and my relatively modest 50Mbps connection to successfully Takeout 200GB of data in a couple of days.

Google takeout is the best gdpr compliant platform of all the big tech giants. Amazon for example lets you wait until the very last day they legally can.

Also they do minimal processing like with the metadata (as others commented) as it is probably how they internally store it and that's what they need to deliver. The simple fact that you can select what you want to request and not having to download everything about you makes it good in my eyes.

I actually see good faith compliance with the gdpr in the Plattform

Not sure if somebody mentioned, but you can export to one drive. So you can get a 1TB account for a free trial or for a single month and export everything there as simple files, no large zips. Then with the app download to the computer and then cancel one drive.

Pretend to be in California/EU and then ask full removal of all your data on both Microsoft and google

Because Google don’t want you to export your photos. They want you to depend on them 100%.

I just have normal home internet and there is just no way to download a 50gig (or 2 gig) file in one go

"Normal" home internet shouldn't have any problem downloading 50 GB files. I download games larger than this multiple times a week.

Just gone through this whole process myself. My god does it suck. Another thing you'll want to be aware of around Takeout with Google Photos is that the photo metadata isn't attached as EXIF like with a normal service, but rather it's given as an accompanying JSON file for each image file. I'm using Memories for Nextcloud, and it has a tool that can restore the EXIF metadata using those files, but it's not exact and now I have about 1.5k images tagged as being from this year when they're really from 2018 or before. I'm looking at writing my own tool to restore some of this metadata but it's going to be a right pain in the ass.

Can you do one album at a time? Select the albums you want to download, then do that file. Then do the next few albums. That way you have direct control over the data you're getting in each batch, and so you'll have a week to get that batch instead of having to start again if the whole thing didn't finish in a week.

I have fancy California Internet and the downloads are surprisingly slow and kept slowing down and turning off. It was such a pain to get my data out of takeout.

It's bad because they don't want you to use it, but they made it exist so that they don't get sued by the European Union.

The word you're looking for is "petty."

Try this then do them one at the time. You have to start the download in your browser first, but you can click "pause" and leave the browser open as it downloads to your server

There was an option to split the download into archives of customizable size IIRC

It's called: vendor lock-in.

Have you tried mounting the google drive on your computer and copying the files with your file manager?

You could try using rclone's Google Photos backend. It's a command line tool, sort of like rsync but for cloud storage. https://rclone.org/

Well, obviously they don't want you to!

Use Drive or if it's more than 15GB or whatever the max is these days. Pay for storage for one month for a couple of dollars on one of the supported platforms and download from there.

Not really helping you here. But when I started using Google Photos, I still manually downloaded files from my phone to local storage. I did this mainly to ensure I have the original copies of my photos and not some compressed image. Turns out that was a wise move as exporting photos from Google is a pretty damned awful experience.