While Google+ may not have been the world’s most active social network, it was home to niche groups of 360 photographers and aficionados that loved to share their works including the Photo Sphere community (16,224 members), the Panoramic Photographers on Google community (4,093 members) and even the Google Trusted Photographers community (371 members).

The news is devastating for users who have years of photographs — be they photo spheres or otherwise — uploaded on the service.

Fortunately, user +Brian Slesinsky posted this helpful tutorial for creating a backup archive of your posts.

Here are the instructions:

  1. Go to https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
  2. Optional: to switch to a Google+ Page click your profile photo at top right, and select the Google+ Page’s Brand Account from the list. Once you have switched, you will see the Page’s Profile image at top right.
  3. Deselect everything in the Takeout list except Google+ Stream.
  4. Download as a zip file. (Creating the archive may take a while if you have a lot of posts)
  5. Unzip.
  6. Open Takeout folder.
  7. Open Google+ Stream folder.
  8. There will be one HTML file per post. Sort by date modified.

Notes:

  • The earliest modified file should be your first post.
  • The file should open in your browser. Click the Permalink link to open the post on Google+.
  •  The archive does not include photos or images you posted to Google+. You can create a separate archive of your photos in Google Takeout > Google Photos (Google+ uploads appear to be in date albums)
  •  You may see a Google+ Pages archive option. This only archives the Circles of your Google+ Pages, not the posts.

 

Source: http://ivrpa.org/tutorial/how-to-archive-your-google-photo-spheres-and-360-imagery/