21 March 2024

Import Google Photos Takeout into Immich

Okay, importing into Immich from a Google Photos Takeout is super easy. Well, it is if you’re familiar with a CLI.

Prepare your takeout

There are two options for getting your Google Photos Takeout ready for importing:

Export as .zip (any size, bigger is better)
Export as .tgz (any size, bigger is better) and extract as per my previous post

Getting `immich-go`

immich-go is a single binary command line tool for importing photos and videos into Immich. It has awesome support for Google Photos takeout archives.

You should get the latest immich-go release for your platform from Immich github releases. I dropped the executable into where I extracted my takeout archives.

1-rwxrwxr-x 1 ariejan ariejan 8.5M Mar 20 18:45 immich-go
2drwxrwxr-x 3 ariejan ariejan    4 Mar 20 14:57 Takeout

Getting your Immich API key

Go to your Immich account settings (click your avatar at the top right). Then select API Keys and create a new key.

You probably already know your Immich url, which might optionally require a port number, depending on your setup.

Dry-run

First, let’s do a dry run. This will read your Takeout archives and test the connection to Immich. It will spit out a lot of info about what’s going to be imported, skipped, etc.

1./immich-go \
2  -server=https://immich.devroom.io \
3  -key=Ir3za64rggrbK3zSIhDfskw8R9b97GTljPPK5NlIEY \
4  upload \
5  -dry-run \
6  -create-albums \
7  -google-photos \
8  Takeout/

-create-albums will re-create your Google Photos albums, which is probably what you want.

In this case I’m providing an extracted Takeout archive, so I need to specify the -google-photos option. If you have .zip files, you can supply takeout-*.zip instead, and the -google-photos option is not strictly necessary.

Importing for realz

If you’re happy what immich-go reported, go ahead and start your import. It can take a few hours, depending on how many photos and videos you want to import.

1./immich-go \
2  -server=https://immich.devroom.io \
3  -key=Ir3za64rggrbK3zSIhDfskw8R9b97GTljPPK5NlIEY \
4  upload \
5  -create-albums \
6  -google-photos \
7  Takeout/

Result?

All my photos and videos are now safely in Immich (backed up to a separate 3TB mirror; offline backup to a Hetzner Storagebox).

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