Facebook announces new tool for transferring images and videos to Google Photos
Facebook announced today plans to launch a new tool next year that will let Facebook users migrate their Facebook photos and videos to a Google Photos account.
The tool is currently being rolled out in Ireland, but will be made available worldwide in early 2020, the company said today in a blog post.
Facebook said it plans "to expand this [exporting feature] to other services in the near future."
Built on the DTP standard
Facebook's upcoming Google Photos export tool is the company's first tool built on the Data Transfer Project (DTP) framework.
The Data Transfer Project is open standard for arranging data in a common format so users could easily move their information from one platform to another.
The project was established in 2017 and was formally announced in July 2018. Founding members included Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. Apple joined the project after a few months.
The DTP standard is comprised of three main components:
- A set of shared data models to represent each vertical (i.e., photos, contacts, playlists)
- Adapters, which handle the authentication of a user to a service (normally OAuth) and the transformation of data to and from the shared data models (importers and exporters)
- A task management framework, which puts all the pieces together and handles the life cycle of a transfer job, including job creation and running the transfer
The DTP code for exporting and importing DTP-formatted content (text, settings, photos, videos) has been open-source and hosted on GitHub in the hopes that other platforms adopt it as well. To help companies get started, the DTP founding members have created extensions for hosting a DTP import/export API on common hosting platforms such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.