From Google Photos to Immich (two users with shared albums)
Heya.. I am having a hard time finding some official resources on how to properly migrate from Google Photos to Immich when we are more than one user with shared albums.. It is mostly in regards to duplicates I guess, but please tell me if I should be aware of something more. - Or if there is an actual guide that I have missed.. 😅
I hope it makes sense to ask here in support - and if not, please just delete the post, that's okay. 🙂
This is how I am thinking of doing it.. Would that work you think? Or can you see something go wrong?:
25 Replies
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If this ticket can be closed you can use the /close command, and re-open it later if needed.This seems like a reasonable enough way to get the same shared album functionality you were using in google photos.
Okay cool, thank you for a bit of confirmation. Guess I'm gonna try it #pray 😁
Just know bulk album share isn't implemented yet, so if you have a lot of albums it can be a bit of a pain 😅
Have about 50, so not thaaat many luckily. 😛
Haven't tried to share one yet, but hopefully just a one time thing, so it's not that bad
if you are willing to experiment, I would first share the albums from the first account, then upload the photos from the 2nd account. I don't know what immich-go will do, if will add them to the shared album or create a private one
I would imagine it's convenient like pressing share and choosing her account - I can manage that 50 times 😄 But bulk would be cool
Hmm
Could try with 3 albums to start
Would give what nomachine said a shot. I had the same thought but wasn't sure how it would be handled
Would be cool if it just worked yeah
The API keys are bound to the user, right? So I need to remember to use a key generated on my own account and one for her account
yes, remember if target user is not admin, you'll need to use both keys (admin and user)
Not sure I am understanding correctly. I have my account (the first created one which is then the admin one), and then I have myself created her account.
I have on my own account created an API key and am using this immich-go command:
./immich-go upload from-google-photos --server=http://192.168.1.2:2283 --api-key=myOwnKey takeout-*.zip.
You mean I need to use --api-key=myOwnKey and the other one I create on hers account with an additional flag, or?When upload to a non admin account you need
--api-key=nonAdminUserApiKey and --admin-api-key=adminApiKey. This is because the admin api key is used to pause and resume some jobs during upload to not cause race conditions that have not yet been addressed on the serverOh damn, good to know, thank you. I'll add
--admin-api-key=adminApiKey to the command when uploading her stuff.
I'll get back here hopefully tonight or tomorrow when I get the chance to test, if you are curious about the outcome 🙂 🎉
Heya again - I'm sorry, but I forgot to confirm something with you guys.. We agree that step 2 (Free up whole phone so no local photos are on the phone) is necessary, right?
Otherwise all the Google Photos photos from the takeout and the current ones locally on the phone would be duplicated when turning on Immich's backup option on the phone, right? Can't seem to find an option to only backup from the backup-enabling point at least? And I guess Immich doesn't magically know they are the same ones?
I'm mostly asking because my wife likes to only upload manually normally which means not all of her photos are on Google Photos (actually only the shared ones in shared albums). So I guess I need to make her upload them all to make a full Google Photos takeout.. But that would of course be nice to avoidare you uploading with storage saver?
I don't think so no
Do you mean in Immich (if it has it)? Or the "free up storage" thingy in Google Photo? That the thing I am going to turn on to delete all local photos on my phone
Google photos has 2 options to upload your photos, original and storage saver
Ah now I understand - everything is original
Very important 😛
Did you ask in regards to my way too long question? Or just a heads up for me to remember having it turned on?
1. stop syncing to Google
2. request and upload takeout with Immich go
3. open immich in your phone (after the internal processing is done) and check if the app detect those assets as already in the server
4. (if Immich thinks the assets in your phone are new) select free device space in Google photos
personally (and this is what I did), I unzipped the takeout, copied all the assets from my phone to the takeout folder (replacing everything), and then I uploaded it to Immich. that way I made sure I had the original files (maybe unnecessary, but I don't trust google)
Oh yeah that makes sense - this is the way to do it on her phone
Thank you! Awesome support ♥️
Yeah I agree.. Trying to get as much away from Google as possible
Oh well, fuc*... Google being annoying again (surprise)..
On my wife's Takeout, I can't even choose albums I have shared with her.......... 🙃
So now I gotta figure out the best and most reliable way to do it manually I guess
hey @Bjørnholt. Did you figure out anything else? I am setting up my server and encountered this issue straight away, even before the upload.
Here are my findings about the takeouts:
1. Albums Shared with you (not created by you) -> NOT in your takeout.
2. Photos you added to Shared Albums (not created by you) -> YES, but all together, and no indicator they were shared or the album they belonged to.
3. Albums that you created and shared with others -> YES (expected)
4. Photos from others in your albums -> ONLY if you use the "Save photos" function first. They won't show in the album though. They have the fromSharedAlbum identifier in the JSON sidecar. No info about specific album.
What you're describing is #1 from her point of view. The albums are not even there.
After all my struggle to set up my Immich server, and I've spent days stuck thinking how to overcome this.
Oh god, the PTSD of getting away from Google 😅
I regret not remembering to come back here and writing down what I did, because it's pretty blurry.. 🙃 I think I did it someway along the lines of: 1. Do a full Takeout of your own stuff for the CLI tool to upload into Immich.. Then you have all your stuff in Immich in the albums and so on, but now you are missing all stuff from other people (only my wife in my case) 2. Delete EVERYTHING from your own Google Photos. (Select the first photo, then scroll down in increments of around 500 photos, press shift and select a photo). Now all YOUR albums that you have shared, are left with other peoples photos in them. 3. I then, annoyingly and manually, logged into my wifes Google Photos to then album after album, selecting everything in them and creating a new album with the same name. So when that's done, now my wife had the albums in her account so they could be in her Takeout.. 4. Then I uploaded all of her stuff to her account with the CLI tool. I have also shared all my albums in Immich with her account. That means she now has the same albums twice.. One with my photos and one with her photos. 5. I then manually once again on her Immich account, went into every single of her albums -> selected all -> added to MY albums with the same name -> deleted her version of the album. Done. I thiiink that's more or less the steps I took.. I can't promise I haven't forgotten something important, sorry 😅
I regret not remembering to come back here and writing down what I did, because it's pretty blurry.. 🙃 I think I did it someway along the lines of: 1. Do a full Takeout of your own stuff for the CLI tool to upload into Immich.. Then you have all your stuff in Immich in the albums and so on, but now you are missing all stuff from other people (only my wife in my case) 2. Delete EVERYTHING from your own Google Photos. (Select the first photo, then scroll down in increments of around 500 photos, press shift and select a photo). Now all YOUR albums that you have shared, are left with other peoples photos in them. 3. I then, annoyingly and manually, logged into my wifes Google Photos to then album after album, selecting everything in them and creating a new album with the same name. So when that's done, now my wife had the albums in her account so they could be in her Takeout.. 4. Then I uploaded all of her stuff to her account with the CLI tool. I have also shared all my albums in Immich with her account. That means she now has the same albums twice.. One with my photos and one with her photos. 5. I then manually once again on her Immich account, went into every single of her albums -> selected all -> added to MY albums with the same name -> deleted her version of the album. Done. I thiiink that's more or less the steps I took.. I can't promise I haven't forgotten something important, sorry 😅
Your way works fine and also takes care of deduplication between users, which Immich doesn't handle atm (would love to know if it's in the plans).
I'm not sure how you did #1, since most probably you've used the "save photos" function and some of your wife's photos are already in your Takeout (but not classified by album).
I'm thinking of just doing:
1. For every Shared Album, create a "owned" copy. That instantly gets all photos from everyone into your takeout, classified in the right album (even if the album wasn't yours). This also can be done easier than manually using Google Photos Toolkit. Still one by one, but quicker.
2. Same for the other user. This causes ofc lots of duplication between the users when both upload their takeouts to Immich.
You can actually choose who you want the owner of each album to be, and only copy it for that person (not both). Then in Immich you'll have to share it back ofc.
With this method you will lose track of ownership for the specific photos. The owner of each album will be the one owning all photos in it after the migration. Not ideal, but I can live with it. After all, the same will happen with friend's photos.
Never saved any of my wifes photos - they are in the albums anyways after all, so that wasn't a problem luckily.
And yeah, I guess you can do that, but I wanted everything to be just how it was in Google Photos. 😛
Can someone help me with sharing all my wife's pictures with her automatically ?
In Google photos, there's an option to auto add all images to facial recognized album that you can share with anyone. Is there such an option in Immich ,]
You are asking in a thread, so you might have better luck making your own. 🙂