Google Photos is giving college students one less thing to worry about at graduation

Google is making a big improvement to student accounts. Later this spring, Google’s Takeout Transfer tool will allow students with school-issued accounts to migrate pictures stored in Google Photos to a personal account, making it easier to transition out of .edu school accounts.

The change was detailed today in a blog post highlighting a number of education-related announcements. Takeout Transfer already lets users on school accounts bulk-transfer files from Google Drive and email from Gmail to a non-school personal account with just a few clicks. Starting soon, that tool will include a Google Photos toggle.

Google Takeout is a tool that lets you export data — emails, photos, calendar events, browser bookmarks, the works — from your Google account. Google Takeout Transfer serves a similar purpose, but rather than letting users download their own data in bulk, it’s tailor-made for users on university-issued accounts to transfer their data from those school Google accounts to personal ones.

There were already ways to move your photos from your .edu account to a personal one; you could download the photos from one account and re-upload them to another, for example, or share them manually inside Google Photos. The new method is a lot quicker, though, being just a couple of clicks.

The option to bulk-transfer Google Photos data out of student Google accounts is coming just in time for graduation season, rolling out “starting in May.” Once it’s available, you’ll be able to transfer your Drive data, emails from Gmail, and pictures from Photos out of your student account using the Takeout Transfer tool here.