Exporting Google Photos to Immich as a form of 3-2-1 backup and to limit the impact if the Google account is disabled.
Google Photos is an excellent photo storage and management service. The only downside is that it is difficult to handle the exported photos. The groups or albums and descriptions are kept in separate JSON files. This is where Immich comes in.
Immich is a open source Docker app from Futo. Together with the standalone program import app, immich-go, the Google Photos takeout can be imported almost seamlessly.
- In Google photos, check through the album names and add the year to the front eg, 2025-01-skiing holiday
- In Google Takeout for Photos, unselect all albums.
- Scroll all the way down to the albums, look for the “Photos in <year> album”. These are the default albums provided by Google Photos. Select one year. This is the base.
- Scroll up and select all custom/self created albums that belong to that year.
- If you skipped this step, these albums will not be exported and will not be accessible in immich.
- Doing post import checks is going to be more difficult. Any future search will have to rely on attached text and image recognition.
- Complete the Takeout wizard.
- When available, download the zipped files.
Use immich-go with your personal Immich API key, import the photos.
immich-go upload from-google-photos <filename> -s <http url> -k <yourapikey>There is no need to expand the zipped files. If there are 10 zipped files, you need to do this 10 times. This is a resource-intensive process; opening multiple windows to do this concurrently is not a good idea.
Run the import job on the same till there are no more errors.
Launch Immich and check the photos. Use the albums to see if all the photos are imported. Immich’s duplicate check is aggressive.