A few months after I started using Immich, I decided to migrate all my google photos data to Immich. Immich is a self-hosted, Google Photos alternative.

Google Takeout

You need to download all Google Photos data with Google Takeout. Google Photos is already chosen on the linked page. Click Next > File type: .zip, File size: change to maximum 50GB > Create export.

After a while, in my case a few hours, Google sent to me an email with a link. Clicked it, and downloaded all .zip files. My photos and videos were totaled just below 150GB. I didn’t know that I had this much. As my internet plan is slow at 100Mbps max, it took 3 hours or so to download the 3 big files.

Immich-go

After googling around for a while, I decided to use immich-go tool to import data to Immich. Downloaded latest binary from the releases page.

Import was easy. This is from github - immich-go README:

immich-go upload from-google-photos --server=http://your-ip:2283 --api-key=your-api-key /path/to/takeout-*.zip --on-server-error continue

I added --on-server-error continue option to skip errors. I had a few thousand import errors, but it didn’t tell me what went wrong. The logs just said they were 400 bad request. Many errors were for photos in albums auto-generated by Google, and so I decided that they are not important for now and moved on.

Immich-go said I have 60K photos and videos. This seems to include tons of duplicates.

Broken thumbnails

After immich-go completed, I looked photos and noticed that more than half thumbnails were broken. So, I re-ran the thumbnail creation job.

  • My account icon > Administrations > choose accout > Jobs
  • > GENERATE THUMBNAILS > click MISSING > (wait)

When it’s done, all photos look to have thumbnails.

Too big to backup to cloud

After the import, I deleted the takeout files of 150GB and ran fstrim, hoping it would shrink backup size. Then, I stopped the VM and created a backup. Unfortunately, fstrim didn’t seem to affect the size, possibly because those capacity were already provisioned, and the backup files were bigger (400+GB) than I had hoped.

As my pCloud usage is 350GB out of 500GB, I can’t upload the backup files to it anymore. I’m thinking to add 1TB ($199) or 2TB ($279) for this Black Friday sale.