Yikes, this is kind of scary. Google Photos is the only place to find some of my older photos. What’s the easiest way to download my entire library for backup on a physical drive?

It works extremely well, and you can re-run it any time to sync new files locally too.

I used it like that for a few months before I finally installed syncthing on my phone and stopped using Google Photos altogether.

Now what I do is take photos on my phone, have them sync to a NAS. And on the NAS I used a modified version of this https://forum.syncthing.net/t/android-photo-sync-with-exifto... to build up a YYYY/MM folder organisation and move files older than 30 days from the syncthing folder into my archive. My archive is then in my Plex so it's still accessible to me.

In essence: 1) Take photo (implicit sync to NAS), 2) wait 30 days, 3) archive photo into long term directory naming convention, whilst making available to Plex and deleting the version from my phone (by deleting the syncthing version it will delete the one on the phone after 30 days too).