Saving What You Posted on Google+

Eight weeks left

Google has set April 2 as the date consumer Google+ ends. Since Monday, no new pages can be created, and from April 2 Google starts deleting what was posted, photographs included.

Most business pages on Google+ hold little worth saving. A few hold years of real work: photographs that exist nowhere else, and answers to customer questions written with care.

Those are worth an afternoon now, because after April there is no second chance to fetch them.

Removing Google+ from your website is a separate job, with its own list.

What is worth keeping

• Photographs of real work, especially any that exist nowhere else.
• Answers to customer questions, left in posts or comment threads.
• Short explanations written for one customer that suit every customer.
• Before-and-after sets and write-ups of particular jobs.
• Dates worth recording, such as openings, moves and milestones.

The second is the one most often lost. A question answered in a comment was asked by one person, but many people have it, and the answer is already written.

Most of the rest can go: links to other sites, seasonal greetings, and posts copied over automatically from Facebook.

Photographs and the album archive

Google+ photographs are stored in what Google calls the album archive, and those are deleted along with the page.

Copies backed up to Google Photos are not affected. But on many business pages, the archive holds the only copy of the best pictures, uploaded from a phone that has since been replaced.

Whose account holds the page

Before anything can be downloaded, somebody has to be able to sign in as the page.

Google+ pages belong to Google accounts, and at many small businesses the account was set up by a former employee, or by an agency as part of a package years ago.

If the account can be recovered, start now; recovery takes time, and April does not move.

If it cannot, the public posts can still be read until April 2, and copying the few that matter by hand is a perfectly good fallback.

Downloading with Google Takeout

Google Takeout is Google's tool for downloading your data from its products, and it works for Google+ pages as well as personal profiles.

Sign in, and if the page belongs to a separate brand account, switch to that account first. Otherwise you download your personal profile instead, which is an easy mistake.

Deselect everything, then select the Google+ entries and the album archive. Google prepares the file and emails a link when it is ready, which can take hours for a large page.

Download it promptly, since the link does not stay valid for long.

Check the archive before April

An archive nobody has opened is a hope, not a copy.

Unzip it on a computer and look. The posts arrive as files a browser can open, and the photographs as ordinary image files, usually at the size they were uploaded.

Check that the posts you remember are there, with their dates and the comments you wanted. If something is missing, there is still time to copy it from the page by hand.

Then store the archive in two places the business controls, such as the shared drive and an external drive, not only on one laptop.

A worked example

A wedding photographer posted most of her work to Google+ between 2012 and 2016, when it was popular with photographers, with an album from every wedding.

Couples asked questions in the comments, and she answered them carefully: how many hours of coverage made sense, what happened if it rained, how long the photographs took.

Her website, meanwhile, had a slider of twelve images and a contact form. The best of her work sat on a platform about to disappear.

She switched to the page's account, downloaded it with Takeout, and checked that the archive opened. She chose forty photographs from ten weddings and emailed each couple to ask again before using them.

The eight questions asked most often became short, plain answers on her booking page. The full archive went onto two drives.

Give it a home on your website

Downloading is half the job. An archive on a drive is safe, but nobody sees it.

The useful material belongs on your website, the one place online that the business controls outright. A platform can change its rules, show your posts to fewer people, or close, as this one is doing.

Photographs go on the pages they illustrate, each with a caption saying what it shows. Answers go where the question arises, so a question about lead times belongs on the booking page.

The originals are usually too heavy for a web page, so keep them as master copies and have smaller versions made for the site.

Permission for photographs of people

Photographs of customers, their children or their homes were usually posted with permission for one place, at one time.

Putting them on your website is a new use. Asking again is a courtesy, and the safer reading of privacy law, which generally expects fresh consent when personal information is used for a new purpose.

A short email is enough. Where the answer is no, or there is no answer, choose a different picture.

The same risk elsewhere

Google+ is the platform closing this year, but the lesson applies to the ones that are not.

Facebook pages and Instagram accounts both offer a download of what you have posted, in their settings. A copy once a year takes minutes, and means a locked account or a changed rule costs you reach rather than your history.

The counter-case

Many pages have nothing worth an afternoon.

A page with a few dozen shared links and no photographs of your own needs no download at all, and the time is better spent removing its icon from your website.

Not everything downloaded belongs on the site, either. A website filled with old social posts, reprinted in bulk, is harder to use than one with ten good photographs and five clear answers.

Where the page does hold real work, download it this month, check it, and move the best of it somewhere you control.

Before April 2

1. Find out who can sign in to the page.
2. Read the page while it is still public.
3. Request a Takeout archive as the page's account.
4. Download it as soon as the email arrives.
5. Open it and check what it contains.
6. Move the best material onto your website.
7. Store the archive in two places.

Step five is the one that turns a download into a copy. An archive from the wrong account looks exactly like a good one until somebody opens it, and after April it cannot be taken again.

Removing Google+ from the website itself is covered in Google+ closes in April.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.