This move frustrated me to no end. Makes backing up my Google Photos that much more of a PITA because you have to use Takeout, which isn't straightforward - if you have a large library, you manually have to download 50+ zip files and "auto download" extensions don't seem to work with the Takeout interface last time I tried.

What do you mean by that? I'm curious because I switched to Google Drive after Dropbox discontinued any real photo support a few years back. I like Dropbox more for file syncing, but put up with Google Drive's weaknesses because I get much better photo management.

Google Photos is now a separate standalone product from Google Drive. You can upload images to either place but they are not synced.

It isn't impossible, just not convenient like it used to be. What I do is sync a copy to my backup device, and use the web interface to download any collages or effects that it auto-generates.

You can then use rclone to sync deletions, which uses their API.

How do you sync a copy to your backup device? My understanding is that it's no longer to programmatically grab the original images, only compressed images are available via the API.

I use one-way Syncthing, so my phone automatically backups my pictures to Google Photos (using the Google Photos app) and my computer (using Syncthing). Then I copy them into a folder locally like they existed previously on Google Drive by year.

Then I run rclone sync:

  rclone sync --dry-run gphotos:media/by-year /local/storage/path

Then if I delete some pictures from Google Photos, the same sync command will delete them from my local backup.