Google+ shutting down on April 2, here’s how to download your photos, other content

Google's social networking platform, Google+, is shutting down for consumers. After April 2, 2019, Google will delete all the content including photos, videos and posts from your account. Ahead of the shut down, Google will bar users from creating new profiles, pages, communities or events from February 4.

In October last year, Google had announced shutting down the social networking platform after its engineers found the APIs to be "challenging to develop and maintain." The company also discovered a critical bug in one of the Google+ People APIs. Another security breach, discovered in December, affected 52.5 million Google+ accounts.

"With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days. In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019. While we recognise there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users," said the company in a blog post.

If you're a Google+ user, here's how you can save your data from getting deleted.

How to download all your Google+ data

Google is allowing users to download an archive of the entire Google+ data, including content from circles, communities and even +1s. The archive also includes your images and videos uploaded on the social networking platform.

Step 1 Visit the Download data page. Ensure all the data is pre-selected.

Step 2 Choose a file type.

Step 3 Select the download format depending upon your preference

Step 4 Click on create archive

Step 5 You can also choose to download specific Google+ data

G Suite users, admins

Note that Google isn't shutting down for enterprise users. In fact, Google says it will continue to make investments in Google+ for enterprise users.

"This means that for those of you who use Google+ as part of G Suite, your accounts will remain active. G Suite users include businesses who pay for its services and educational institutions and other organisations that use G Suite at no cost," the company said in a blog post.