If you're asking if you can restore photos back to your phone that are in the cloud, then I have just went through this. There is no easy way on Android, there's a slightly less annoying way on iPhone. On Android, you can open each picture individually and choose download to phone. One by one. On iPhone you can select about 250 photos at a time and do the above, so while annoying is doable. Now, I recently went through your annoyance and I ended up just ditching Google Photos but I did get all my photos back. I used Google takeout to get an export which was only about 65Gb. Then I had to use a paid application called Google Photo RESTORER (Think I'm getting the name wrong) to restore all my photo metadata back. Google for some reason doesn't keep the meta data with the actual pictures, maybe this is to discourage users removing their data? Anyway, I already have a OneDrive subscription so I uploaded all the pictures via my PC to OneDrive into the camera uploads folder. Disabled Google Photos backup and enabled OneDrive photo backup on my phone. I have to say, coming from IPhone I am very disappointed in how Google treats my data. On my iPhone I could choose to keep a copy of all my photos locally + have a copy in iCloud with just one click. Probably haven't answered your question but hope I provided some useful information. Good luck whatever you decide to do. Answer from Fancy_Special_8475 on reddit.com