How to find photos missing from Google Photos

A guide for when you have photos on an old laptop, a backup drive, a memory card or a phone backup, and you're not sure which of them are already in Google Photos.

It's a common situation: years of photos spread over old computers and drives, and a Google Photos library that has most of them. Google Photos doesn't have a button for "show me what's on this drive that you don't have", so you have to work it out another way. Here are three options, from free and manual to a few clicks.

Option 1: Upload everything and let Google sort it out

Google Photos usually recognizes a photo it already has, if the file is exactly the same, and doesn't add it a second time. So one approach is simply to upload the whole folder.

Good for: small folders with a fast internet connection.

Why Google often doesn't catch the duplicates

Google only skips a photo when the file is exactly the same, down to the last byte. Old computers and drives are full of copies that look identical to you but are different files:

• Resized copies: a smaller version made for email, a slideshow or a digital photo frame.
• Screenshots of a photo, or a zoomed-in or cropped version of it.
• Edited copies: rotated, brightened, red-eye removed, or with a filter.
• Copies from somewhere else: the same photo downloaded again from Facebook, WhatsApp, a text message or an email. These services shrink photos and strip out details, so the file changes.
• Converted copies: an iPhone photo (HEIC) that was saved as a JPG along the way.

Every one of these gets uploaded as a new photo, and you end up with two, three or more copies of the same moment in your library.

Why that matters: your free storage

• Duplicates use up your storage. A free Google account comes with 15 GB, shared between Google Photos, Gmail and Google Drive. Photos uploaded in Original quality count against it, duplicates included, so a library full of copies fills up much sooner, and then Google asks you to pay for more.
• Cleaning up afterwards is hard. Google Photos has no "find duplicates" button, so removing them means scrolling through your library and deleting them one by one.
• It's slow. Uploading thousands of photos can take hours or days, even the ones Google ends up skipping.
• You never see what was actually missing.

That's why it pays to find the photos that are really missing first, and upload only those.

Option 2: Compare by hand

Open the old folder on one side of the screen and Google Photos on the other, and check photo by photo, usually by date. It costs nothing, and for a few dozen photos it's fine. For a few thousand, it's days of work and easy to get wrong.

Option 3: Compare a copy of your Google Photos with the old folder

This is the reliable way. You download a copy of your Google Photos library to your computer with Google Takeout, then compare it with the old folder, and only upload what's really missing.

Step 1: Download your Google Photos with Google Takeout

1. Go to takeout.google.com and sign in.
2. Click Deselect all, then tick only Google Photos.
3. Click Next step, choose Export once, file type .zip, and a file size of 2 GB or larger.
4. Click Create export. Google emails you when it's ready: anything from a few hours to a couple of days for a big library.
5. Download every .zip part into one folder. Each part holds different photos, so don't skip any.

Two things to know about Takeout: it puts a copy of a photo in every album it belongs to, so the download is bigger than you might expect, and photos you add to Google Photos afterwards aren't in it.

Step 2: Compare

Comparing by file name doesn't work well: cameras and phones reuse names like IMG_0001.jpg, and Google sometimes renames files. A proper comparison looks at the photos themselves.

Photo Wizard, our Windows program, was made for exactly this:

• Choose your Takeout folder as the Source Location. It reads the .zip files directly, so there's no need to unzip them.
• Choose the old laptop folder, drive or memory card as the Target Folder.
• Click Identify. Photo Wizard skips exact copies, sets aside look-alikes (resized or re-saved copies) for you to check, and shows only what's really missing.
• Copy the missing photos and videos into one folder with a click.

Scanning and comparing are free, with no time limit, and you can copy 25 photos or videos free to try it.

See Photo Wizard

Step 3: Upload what's missing

1. Open photos.google.com, click Upload (top right) and choose Computer.
2. Open the folder with the missing photos, press Ctrl+A to select everything, and click Open.
3. Keep the browser tab open until the upload finishes. For thousands of files, upload a few hundred at a time.

Tips

• Keep the originals until you've checked the upload worked. Photo Wizard only ever copies; it never moves or deletes anything.
• Original quality or Storage saver? Google Photos asks which to use. "Storage saver" makes photos smaller to save space; choose "Original quality" if you want to keep them exactly as they are (it uses your Google storage).
• Checking several old devices? With Photo Wizard, keep its upload folder (it sits inside your Takeout folder) until you've done them all: it counts as part of your collection, so photos you found on the first device won't show up as "missing" again on the next one.