TAKE BACK CONTROL

The odds are good that most of your pictures are taken on an iPhone or Android device and automatically synced to your Apple or Google account. It’s something you barely need to set up when you purchase a new handset – the OS makers make sure that it’s as easy as possible. Fortunately, they also make it fairly easy to pull your photos out of the cloud as well.

If Google is your current cloud of choice, then visit https://takeout.google. com to view the shockingly long list of Google products you’ve used that are storing your data. Click the deselect all checkbox (unless you genuinely want to download everything you’ve ever put into Google). Scroll down until you reach Google Photos and then put a check in the checkbox.

At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a Next Step button, Click it and select Export Once. After a day or two, Google will send you a link to a zip file that contains your photos. Note: archives will be split into 2GB chunks and depending on how avid a photographer you are, there may be quite a few of them.

Apple, as usual, makes things a little more difficult and to download all your photos from iCloud. Windows and Mac users can manage it easily enough with the iCloud desktop application. However, there isn’t an official version for Linux. If you don’t want to mess around with VMs or Wine, visit www.icloud.com then go to your photo library. Select the first photo, then scroll down to the bottom of the screen and select the last photo while holding down Shift. Click the download button. Now delete your Apple and Google accounts with no regrets!