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As someone looking to exfiltrate my photos from Google, I'm about to trial Immich, and I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Sounds like it's a good next step for me.

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There's plenty of tutorials but you can request a Google Takeout of your photos and then point immich-go at it. I can confirm that this works really well.

https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

The problem with google takeout is that it generates hundred of files to download as ZIP. I tried it in my own collection (800GB).

Agree - it's annoying. rclone to the rescue. Requires choosing Google Drive as the destination and then downloading with rclone to your computer. It's the closest to sane I've found.

https://metadatafixer.com/learn/how-to-download-google-takeo...

Claude made a PHP script for me that did API to Google Photos and pulls them all to my archive location.

I struggled with Immich, I didn't like the rclone option. I'm intending to go back to Immich but my first priority was to get the stuff out of Google. That's done, so with all my free time (ha!) I can get the family Immich going.

Nice. The PHP script could also write metadata back into the photo so it gets extracted by Immich on import. Just an additional prompt :)

I was planning on having Immich read from my archive. Then Immich on the phones sends right there (VPN?) and skips G all together. But maybe I'll end up with Amdroid->Google->PHP->Immich

Not sure if what I said made sense. I mean inject titles, descriptions, etc from the Google Takeout into the photos EXIF. Then when you import them into Immich, it'll extract those into its own database.

Not sure if it's still the same but years ago when you get your own photos from Google photos via it's APIs you could only get large thumbnails so a great quality reduction. So make sure yours are the original quality. Takeout was the only way out your photos in original quality.

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