What is the Best way to migrate Google-Photos to Immich?
from Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Jan 09:22
https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted/p/1661666/what-is-the-best-way-to-migrate-google-photos-to-immich

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:

  1. I have a bunch of crap mixed into my Google photos, old WhatsApp images from meme groups I used to be in etc.
  2. 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.

#degoogle #immich #selfhosted

threaded - newest

Cerothen@lemmy.ca on 14 Jan 09:34 next collapse

takeout.google.com

Export your photos with take out

Then use immich-go to import

github.com/simulot/immich-go

gjoel@programming.dev on 14 Jan 11:39 next collapse

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.

lemmy_get_my_coat@lemmy.world on 14 Jan 11:58 collapse

Definitely do this. I ended up with the default file size value, which gave me thousands of files to download.

Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works on 15 Jan 14:22 collapse

Immich go can accept wild cards fyi. Toss all those in a directory and point it at that.

lemmy_get_my_coat@lemmy.world on 15 Jan 22:07 collapse

Yeah that part was fine. The uploading parts wasn’t the problem - it was clicking through and downloading all the takeout files that was made easier by maxing out the zip size option.

MIXEDUNIVERS@discuss.tchncs.de on 14 Jan 13:24 next collapse

i second this too amazing tool

antrosapien@lemmy.ml on 14 Jan 13:29 next collapse

Found it the hard way… Extracted the zips,and deleted; just to find out I gotta download em again or compress it

Kyle@lemmy.ca on 14 Jan 15:35 next collapse

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.

123@programming.dev on 14 Jan 22:23 collapse

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.

ITGuyLevi@programming.dev on 15 Jan 00:13 next collapse

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.

123@programming.dev on 15 Jan 00:14 collapse

Right, the problem only happened on google checkout for me.

Cerothen@lemmy.ca on 15 Jan 02:11 next collapse

For the ones I imported it seems like the location data is still there

Cactopuses@lemmy.world on 15 Jan 21:06 next collapse

This so usually stored on the photos as exif data

123@programming.dev on 16 Jan 03:38 collapse

Right, sorry that’s what I meant to type which got corrected to “exit”. When I tried it it would be exported as a separate set of json files instead of being part of the images. Glad to hear that’s not the case any longer or that this tool can automatically handle it.

MrTolkinghoen@lemmy.zip on 15 Jan 23:41 collapse

Yes

_Nico198X_@europe.pub on 14 Jan 09:37 next collapse

no really, no. because what you want to keep is subjective. like @Cerothen@lemmy.ca said, which is what i did, you just dump and import. but any curating is a manual effort.

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 14 Jan 09:39 collapse

It would be great if there was kind of cleanup plugin for Immich.

Like Tinder for pics you want to keep or dump. I could spend 10min every day in the train to swipe left or right on pics I want to keep or remove.

femtek@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 14 Jan 10:06 next collapse

You could do the cleanup in Google, search for ex and delete them, delete the meme folder if you have one. Mine are separated by what app they came from.

gjoel@programming.dev on 14 Jan 11:38 collapse

Maybe you could use the immich face recognition to delete after import?

azezeB@discuss.tchncs.de on 14 Jan 09:45 next collapse

For the step 2 you could use the face recognition baked into Immich to find and maybe delete/hide the photos

androidul@lemmy.world on 14 Jan 10:29 next collapse

seeing this question raised and looking for a google-to-immich migrator utility in the comments

hitmyspot@aussie.zone on 14 Jan 12:39 next collapse

Immich-go is what you’re looking for.

7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 15 Jan 01:05 collapse

I used the cli for immich to import mine.

Eyekaytee@aussie.zone on 14 Jan 10:34 next collapse

i did the google take out and then just a regular drag and drop, everything went fine but all my screenshots had no dates in the metadata by the looks so it put them all on a single date which caused immich to stop loading properly

just once it did I went through and deleted all my old screenshots and now it’s all good again :)

whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works on 14 Jan 10:40 next collapse

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)

FishFace@piefed.social on 14 Jan 12:31 next collapse

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.

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 14 Jan 13:12 collapse

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.

scott@lem.free.as on 14 Jan 19:12 next collapse

*sift

prenatal_confusion@feddit.org on 14 Jan 21:11 collapse

Please elaborate

scott@lem.free.as on 14 Jan 22:19 collapse

OP used the word “siff” instead of the word “sift”.

prenatal_confusion@feddit.org on 16 Jan 06:11 collapse

Ah thanks :)

yoz@aussie.zone on 14 Jan 23:02 next collapse

Is immich paid or free? I have unlimited storage for google photos for free lol

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 15 Jan 04:13 collapse

Google Photos isn’t free. You are the product.

Also it’s literally not free, it’s cheaper to host Immich than it is to pay for storage indefinitely

yoz@aussie.zone on 15 Jan 05:03 collapse

Its literally free my dude. I got unlimited storage 

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 15 Jan 07:55 collapse

How?

yoz@aussie.zone on 15 Jan 08:28 collapse

xdaforums.com/…/module-gphotos-unlimited-without-…

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 15 Jan 11:28 collapse

Cool so you don’t have unlimited storage and might lose everything if Google decides to patch the exploit you’re using.

[deleted] on 15 Jan 12:36 collapse

.

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 15 Jan 12:52 collapse

You don’t have unlimited storage though.

Google will patch your exploit eventually and you could lose all your data.

monomon@programming.dev on 15 Jan 07:42 next collapse

I didn’t see it mentioned here, but rclone has a Google Photos backend, that will allow you to pull everything.

Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works on 15 Jan 14:19 next collapse

Holy shit this is huge. Like… Massive for me

Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works on 16 Jan 01:59 collapse

Looks like it can’t pull original quality? I might be misreading.

lps2@lemmy.ml on 15 Jan 18:31 next collapse

Damn, wish I had known about that before I went the takeout method

sturlabragason@lemmy.world on 15 Jan 21:58 collapse

This finally opened a crack on the door of my technical debt and vendor lock-in with Google. Thank you! 😊

monomon@programming.dev on 16 Jan 14:17 collapse

Yeah it’s great, we’re looking at doing the same both at work and at home.

redxef@feddit.org on 15 Jan 07:57 next collapse

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.

DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone on 15 Jan 09:27 collapse

I just put it on my nas then used the external library feature in immich