Mission Bridge

Saving Their Photos and Memories Before They Come Home

A simple, step-by-step guide for what to do before your missionary's account is gone for good.

⏰ There's no official, guaranteed timeline for when a Missionary Google Account gets deactivated after your missionary returns. Real reports range from a few months to well over a year, and there's no way to know ahead of time which one you'll get. Once it happens, anything not saved is gone for good. Start this while they're still serving, not after.
1

Set up Partner Sharing now, while they're still serving

Google has a built-in feature called Partner Sharing. It automatically copies new photos from your missionary's Google Photos into your own personal account, in the background, with nothing to do each week.

It's free, and it's the single most important step here. Here's how to set it up:

  1. Have your missionary open Google Photos on their phone
  2. Tap their profile picture (top right), then Partner Sharing
  3. Tap Get Started and choose to share with your personal Google account email
  4. When prompted, turn on "Auto save." This is the setting that actually matters. Without it, photos are only shared, not copied.
The most common mistake is turning on Partner Sharing but skipping "Auto save." If it's off, the photos are only visible to you, not actually copied over. And once a photo is auto-saved, it becomes a real, independent copy in your own library, not a link back to theirs. It'll still be there even after the missionary account is deleted for good.

One catch if you're setting this up partway through the mission instead of on day one: Partner Sharing lets you choose to share "all photos" or only photos "since a specific date." Make sure yours is set to all photos. Otherwise, everything taken before you turned this on never gets backed up.

2

Watch for storage running out, on both ends

Missionary Google Accounts have limited storage, and missionaries can't buy more anymore (Google took that option away a few years back). Running out mid-mission is common, and when it happens, missionaries often end up deleting photos just to keep taking new ones, sometimes before Partner Sharing ever gets a chance to back them up.

Once you've confirmed a batch of photos actually made it into your account (Step 3 below covers how), it's fine for your missionary to delete those same photos on their end to free up space. Your copy is independent and won't be touched.

If storage is really tight, there's another option: share an empty album from your own Google account to their missionary account, and have them manually drop photos into it. Anything moved into your shared album lives in your storage instead of theirs, freeing up their space right away.

Worth knowing: your own account has a limit too. A standard personal Google account comes with 15 GB free, shared across Gmail, Drive, and Photos, and if your account is fairly new, it might currently be capped at just 5 GB until you verify a phone number with Google (this changed earlier in 2026). Two years of someone else's photos and videos adds up faster than you'd think. Before setting up Partner Sharing, check your storage at one.google.com/storage and either clear some space or grab a cheap Google One plan (around $2/month for 100 GB) so this doesn't stall out halfway through.

3

Check that it's actually working

About a week after setting up Partner Sharing, open Google Photos on your own device and look for a new album or section with your missionary's recent photos. Nothing new? Partner Sharing probably isn't set up right. Go back to Step 1 and double check "Auto save" is on.

Check back in every month or so throughout the mission. A setup problem is a lot easier to fix with months to spare than to discover right before they come home.

4

About 60 days before they come home, do a full export as backup

Partner Sharing should be capturing everything automatically by now, but it's worth one more full backup as a safety net, using Google Takeout:

  1. Have your missionary go to takeout.google.com while logged into their missionary account
  2. Select only Google Photos (deselect everything else)
  3. Choose ZIP format, and pick a reasonable file size (50GB is usually fine)
  4. Request the export. This can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two, depending on how much they've taken
  5. Once it's ready, Google will email a download link. Download the file(s) to a computer, not just a phone, since they can be large
Think of this as a safety net, not a replacement for Partner Sharing. If Partner Sharing was set up correctly, this backup should mostly just confirm what you already have.

Small thing worth knowing before you unzip: you'll see a tiny .json file sitting next to each photo. That's just metadata like the date and location, not the photo itself, so don't worry if you spot these. The real photo or video should be right next to it with a matching name.

5

Save their emails too

If you've been using Mission Bridge throughout their mission, every email they've sent is already saved permanently in their archive. Nothing to do here.

If there are other emails or files sitting in their missionary Google account that you never forwarded, include Gmail in the same Google Takeout export from Step 4 to catch those too.

6

After they're home, confirm everything came through

Once your missionary is home, take some time together looking through what's been saved. It's also a good moment to add in any extra photos from their personal phone, companions, or things that were shared with them but never made it into their own account.

If something seems to be missing, reach out to us. We're happy to help you track down what happened while there's still time to fix it. One more place worth checking first: Google Photos keeps deleted items in a trash folder for about 60 days before they're gone for good, so if something looks missing right when your missionary gets home, look there before assuming the worst.