I’ve been running Immich for about 6 months now, and it’s smooth and stable.
I’ve synced my camera roll to it and loving it.
Next step is to move the ~150gb of media on Google-Photos over.
How do I best do that?
I also have some other issues I’d like to address before or after the migration:
- I have a bunch of crap mixed into my Google photos, old WhatsApp images from meme groups I used to be in etc.
- Thousands of photos of Ex girlfriends mixed in (not exactly sure what to do about these)
Is there a way to siff through these efficiently and keep what I want? I have ~20k photos some dating back to 2006 so it feels like a mountain to climb.
I didn’t see it mentioned here, but rclone has a Google Photos backend, that will allow you to pull everything.
Damn, wish I had known about that before I went the takeout method
Holy shit this is huge. Like… Massive for me
I got the export of my data, which was photos and adjacent json files containing metadata, there is a script somewhere on github that merges the metadata back into the files. Then use the immich cli to upload the data.
Export your photos with take out
Then use immich-go to import
Does that properly keep metadata like location and other exit entries? I recall google takeout used to suck at that. I had to export using their web UI 1000 at a time or so back in the day to keep that info.
For the ones I imported it seems like the location data is still there
I was too lazy and immich-go may not have existed when I migrated but I just selected and downloaded my pictures from Google Photos then just uploaded them to Immich and they seemed to keep all their metadata.
Right, the problem only happened on google checkout for me.
Note that immich go doesn’t need you to extract the zip files. Also, you can set each file to 50GB making everything a lot easier.
Definitely do this. I ended up with the default file size value, which gave me thousands of files to download.
Immich go can accept wild cards fyi. Toss all those in a directory and point it at that.
This is the answer.
Additional ideas: I happened to be on Synology and wanted to download google takeout files directly from Google to the nas. So I ran an instance of chromium in docker and used that browser to download the 50gb takeout files directly to the nas.
Take note of the size of your immich library before and after you import with immich go, and how big the takeout files are before using immich go. If you miss a few files you’ll know because of the size discrepancy.
i second this too amazing tool
Found it the hard way… Extracted the zips,and deleted; just to find out I gotta download em again or compress it
For the step 2 you could use the face recognition baked into Immich to find and maybe delete/hide the photos
for whatsapp I think the files are prefixed with “wa” or something and actually you could check the default filename formatting of real pictures and filter out all others (to put in a different location)
from this you could also check the size/ratio: pictures you took are usually not scared shaped, and definitely not in a gif format
filtering those out might already reduce the manual work
(for the last thing, IMO those photos are still part of your life, maybe put them aside but don’t delete things you could regret later, but that’s really up to you and your feelings)
I’m interested in the same question but more broadly: currently everything gets automatically backed up to Google, or mindlessly shared to Google. I see that Immich supports backing up folders, but I’m worried about missing an app and not backing stuff up or something like that.
I think you can select all folders, I recommend taking the path I did. Run Immich in parallel with Google-Photos for a few months and see if you like it.
I did so an synced my camera roll from my phone (~6000 photos) and it works great. I also added some family members etc. and they also like it.
Now in the process of moving everything over.
seeing this question raised and looking for a google-to-immich migrator utility in the comments
I used the cli for immich to import mine.
