Starting today, you'll have a couple of new features to make it even easier to download your data.

First, your original folder hierarchy is now maintained if you export files from Google Drive. Gone are the days of looking at the contents of your zip file and wondering which "secret_plans" file is which.

Your folder hierarchy is preserved.

Second, you can now pick a single resource within a service to download - for instance, a single Picasa album or top-level folder from Drive - instead of exporting every single file. To try it out, go to the "Choose services" tab and click on "Configure..." once you've added a service that supports this.

Want to download only your nefarious plans and all of your pictures of cats? We've got you covered!

These are just a few things that we've been working on lately. Stay tuned for lots of excitement in 2013!

Posted by Nick Piepmeier, The Data Liberation Front

We're always working to improve our tools and make it easier for users to control and access their data. Today we are happy to add support for two new services in Google Takeout.

Latitude: Download a json file with your location data.

Reader: You can already export your data within Reader. Now that functionality comes to Google Takeout. Export an xml file of your subscriptions and your lists of starred, shared, following (and more) items in json format.
Posted by Kári Ragnarsson, The Data Liberation Front

Your Takeout menu is growing.  Today's entrée:  YouTube videos.

Previously, you've been able to download individual transcoded videos from your YouTube Video Manager.  But starting today, you also have a more efficient way to download your videos from YouTube. With Google Takeout, you can download all of the original videos that you have uploaded in a few simple clicks.  No transcoding or transformation -- you’ll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded.  Your videos in.  Your videos out.

https://www.google.com/takeout/#custom:youtube

Posted by Brian Hawkins, YouTube Engineer and Data Liberator.

It’s been easy to liberate your Google Docs in lots of different formats for awhile now -- ODT, PDF, RTF, Text, Word, HTML -- you name it. Starting today, you can export them along with everything else on the Google Takeout menu.

Choose to download all of the Docs that you own through Takeout in any of the formats mentioned above. We’re making it more convenient for you to retrieve your information however you want -- you can even Takeout just your docs if you'd like. Lastly, be sure to click on the new "Configure" menu if you'd like to choose different formats for your documents.

Posted by JJ Lueck, The Data Liberation Front

Enough of these goofy videos for Google Takeout. It’s time for an instructional screencast video instead.

This week, Gmail added support for downloading your recorded chat logs via IMAP. All of the entries that you can see in your Gmail chats label will now be delivered to your local email client if it is configured to use IMAP.

We have some information about how to set up and use IMAP for Gmail liberation on our dataliberation.org site, but since chat liberation has been requested by many users in the past (both on twitter and our moderator page), here is a screencast that demonstrates this new feature in use.

If you already use IMAP to synchronize your Gmail account to a local device, enabling this new chat log export is as simple as clicking on the “Show in IMAP” checkbox for Chats in the Labels tab of your Gmail settings.

Posted by Daniel Benson, Data Liberator

If you use Google Voice to manage your phone-life, we’ve got some good news: your data -- from call history, to voicemail (including transcripts!), to greetings and recordings -- is now available in Google Takeout. Starting today, you can download a copy of all your voice communications along with data from other products with one click. Voicemail messages and greetings are exported as mp3s, text messages as microformatted html, and forwarding phone numbers as a vcard.

Give it a shot, either with all your Google Takeout data, or by itself.

One more product liberated - and many more to go!

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front

We're happy to announce a new open source application that allows you to import and export your Google Tasks, called Google Tasks Porter.

Google Tasks Porter is designed with other applications that contain task lists in mind. It supports import and export via the iCalendar format which is used by a variety of applications, including iCalendar itself. It also supports import and export to Microsoft Outlook via a CSV format. Additionally, Google Tasks Porter supports export from Remember the Milk using its iCalendar export, and import to Remember the Milk via email. You can also download a list of all your tasks in an HTML format which is designed to be portable and parseable.

Google Tasks Porter allows you to create a set of "snapshots" of your data, each representing a list of all your tasks at a particular point in time. You can then save or delete these snapshots, and you can export a snapshot at any time to another application using any of the available formats. You can also upload an ics or csv file in order to import the tasks contained therein into Google Tasks.

The application is available on the web at http://google-tasks-porter.appspot.com. The source code is also available on Google Code at http://google-tasks-porter.googlecode.com using the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please try the application out and let us know what you think. You can provide feedback via the mailing list at google-tasks-porter@googlegroups.com.

By Dwight Guth, The Data Liberation Front