TL;DR
Reporting a bug takes ten seconds
Click the extension's icon in your Chrome toolbar, press Report a bug or feature request, and describe what happened. Your version, browser and settings are attached automatically, so there is nothing to look up. Leave your email if you want a reply. It is optional.
1.Getting started
- Open photos.google.com.
- Look in Google's own header, near Create and the help icon. The extension adds one button there.
- Press it to open Select photos, or just tick photos with Google's own circles. Either way the action bar appears once something is selected.
2.Common problems
The button doesn't appear in the header
Almost always one of three things:
- You're not on the photo grid. The button only appears where there is something to select: the main library, an album, or a search result. It hides in the single-photo viewer and in Trash.
- The page loaded before the extension did. Reload the tab.
- The extension is disabled. Check
chrome://extensions.
If none of those fix it, Google may have changed the header markup. Report it and include your Chrome version.
Download does nothing, or no files appear
Downloading needs Chrome's downloads permission, which the extension asks for the first time you use it rather than at install. If you dismissed that prompt, open the extension's popup and press Grant download permission.
Files land in a subfolder of your normal Downloads directory. The popup shows which, and you can change it there.
If Chrome is set to ask where to save each file, a large batch will queue a lot of dialogs. Turn off “Ask where to save each file” in Chrome's download settings first.
Select all stops before reaching everything
Google Photos only keeps a screenful of tiles in the page at a time, so selecting everything means scrolling the whole library. On a large library that takes a while, and the count climbs as it goes.
Leave the tab in the foreground while it runs. A background tab is throttled by Chrome and the walk slows to a crawl. Pressing Clear stops it.
It says some photos failed
That message is doing its job. Rather than assume an action worked, the extension checks each item afterwards. A delete is only counted once the photo has actually gone from your library, and a description is only counted once it has been read back from Google.
Failures usually mean Google was slow or rate-limiting. Press Retry, which re-runs only the items that failed.
I deleted something by mistake
Open Google Photos Trash. Deleted items stay there and are fully recoverable for 60 days. The extension moves things to trash, it never destroys them.
My edits didn't change the photos in Google Photos
That is deliberate. Edit & export renders your edits in the browser and saves them as new files in your Downloads folder. The originals in your library are left untouched, so a batch edit can never damage what you have stored.
Screenshots, collages or motion photos aren't in the filter results
Google doesn't label these in the photo grid. It only separates them on its own category pages. Picking one of those filters navigates you there, which means a page reload. If the grid comes back empty, either you have none of that type, or Google changed the page that filter uses; the extension will say so rather than silently report zero.
Everything broke after a Google Photos update
The extension works by driving the Google Photos interface, so a redesign on Google's side can break features until an update ships. Report it with what you were doing and your Chrome version. That is the fastest route to a fix.
3.What it can't do
- Work outside photos.google.com. No mobile app, no Google Drive, no other site.
- Recover photos already purged from Trash. After 60 days they are gone at Google's end, and the extension holds no copy.
- Beat Google's own pace. Large batches are paced deliberately so Google Photos keeps up; rushing it causes the silent failures this tool exists to avoid.
- Replace a backup. For a full archive with albums and metadata, useGoogle Takeout.
4.Privacy, briefly
Your photos are never uploaded anywhere. Downloads go straight from Google to your computer, and edits are rendered locally. The extension sends anonymous counts about which features were used, which you can switch off in the popup. Full detail in theprivacy policy.
5.Still stuck?
Open the extension's popup and press Report a bug or feature request. Tell us what you did, what you expected, and what happened instead. Or emailaustinclarkeapps@gmail.com.
Independent project. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Google. Google Photos is a trademark of Google LLC. Back to the site