Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

Creating images from snapshots

In some cases, it may be useful to create a custom image from an existing snapshot. For example, a snapshot may have been created from an instance's boot disk before that instance was modified in some way that makes it unsuitable as a base for the custom image. To create a custom image from a snapshot, first create a new disk from the snapshot:

gcloud compute disks create <DISK_NAME> --source-snapshot <SNAPSHOT>

Once the disk is created, it can be used to create the custom image as usual.

While snapshots cannot be shared across projects, custom images can. This means that custom images are a valid approach to sharing snapshots between projects. This method is often used to migrate VMs from one project to another. ...