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.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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I just put it on my nas then used the external library feature in immich
I didn't see it mentioned here, but rclone has a Google Photos backend, that will allow you to pull everything.
Holy shit this is huge. Like... Massive for me
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
*sift
Please elaborate
OP used the word "siff" instead of the word "sift".
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 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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you could use the immich face recognition to delete after import?
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.
Immich-go is what you're looking for.
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.