If you dislike command lines, Air Explorer provides a dual-pane interface. It treats Google Drive like an FTP server. Simply drag and drop a folder; it will bypass the zip compression and download all subfolders natively at the maximum speed your internet allows.

Set the file size limit (e.g., 50GB) to avoid splitting your data into dozens of small zip files.

No recompression, no zip corruption, full resolution & metadata.

: Google Drive does not compress files during a standard download. Even though the files are packed into a ZIP archive, ZIP is a lossless format—meaning your high-resolution images and 4K videos remain 100% identical to the originals once extracted.

: A Google Workspace extension that allows one-click bulk downloads without zipping directly in the browser. 3. Ensuring "High Quality" Preservation