You can use it for all sorts of things including exporting your contacts, calendar, Google Drive files, location history and more. Takeout is a service that allows you to export or back up a copy of the data Google holds on you for its various services. To do it you'll need to use Google Takeout.
So these are the steps for bulk downloading your photos with relative ease. You can do it from your phone (as we'll detail below) but it's far easier to do from your computer, especially if you're planning on backing up a lot of photos and that's where you'll store them. There are a few different ways to download photos from Google Photos. How to download your Google Photos to your computer