Three-way Google Photos/Immich/NAS mess
Hi all, I am facing a challenging scenario:
As a family of 4 members we have a NAS with all the pictures ever taken, just brutally organized in folders as if each one was an album.
Back when Google Photos storage was free (the original quality for Pixel owners and compressed for everyone else), we decided to upload everything there to have an easily accessible copy on the go (didn't matter if quality was a bit lower).
In doing that, we realized that all the photos taken from older cameras lack the location information and often have the wrong time/date cause the time zone didn't adjust automatically.
So we proceeded to painstakingly fix all of that manually, album by album, over a few months.
Now I would like to leave Google Photos and switch to Immich, but I face this scenario:
- on my NAS, I have the uncompressed pictures with the wrong metadata
- on Google Photos, I have the compressed pictures with the correct metadata
And, of course, I would like to have Immich populated with uncompressed pictures with the correct metadata.
This, on top of the existing issues with migrating shared albums from Google Photos to Immich (I read the thread related to that, and it makes me wanna cry), really deters me from even attempting this.
Am I missing something obvious that would greatly simplify all of this?
Should I just wait cause future Immich development is going to simplify such situations?
3 Replies
:wave: Hey @LucaVignati,
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If this ticket can be closed you can use the /close command, and re-open it later if needed.There’s not going to be a easy way around this and immich will likely not have anything down the line that will make it easier
I recommend starting with trying to gain consistency between your Google photos and the uncompressed originals by fixing the dates locally. Once you have that the upload to immich will be easy
I don’t even know how immich would handle this since there is no real way to match up the images other than by filename which can have duplicates
Here is an idea:
- Immich support sidecar XMP
https://immich.app/docs/features/xmp-sidecars/
XMP are files that contain metadata.
If your uncompressed & compressed files have exactly the same names, then you can find a way to extract all the xmp files from google drive photos, put them next to the uncompressed ones and there you. Ofc it's not that simple you need a script to do batch extracts (get some IA help for that). But i think it can be done !