Google-drive – What’s the easiest way to download all albums from Google Photos

If you upload using the Google Photos uploader, albums won't get automatically created, but the folder name will get saved with the photo metadata.

Try this: after uploading your photos from multiple folders, do a search to one of the folder names ("solar eclipse" in your case). This will list all your photos uploaded from that folder. Now - for the moment - you can put up with this funcitonality (always accessing your albums by a search).

Albums in Google Photos are completely separate from folders in Google Drive. Thus, you will have to export the photos from Google Photos, and upload them to Google Drive. I'm going to assume you use Backup and Sync to sync your Google Drive with your computer, as that will make this process easier.

You can download the album from Google Photos, and save it in a folder in your Google Drive where you keep your photographs. Then, unzip the folder you downloaded, and add your photos to the shared folder. If you don't use Backup and Sync, the only difference is that uploading the photos to Google Drive is done through the web app (drive.google.com).

I'm sorry that the migration is not done through the cloud. Migration in the opposite direction is supported—you can copy images from Google Drive to Google Photos (syncing was disabled in July 2019). But, photographs were intended to be used in Google Photos—that is why Google doesn't really support migrating the photographs back into Google Drive.