Does anyone have any pointers on the best way to import roughly 14 Google takeout chunks into immich?
I've downloaded all the chunks once, only to find them corrupted due to... Their 50gb size and using a browser in theory. One also cannot seem to use wget or alternatives because of the auth / session cookies required via Google takeout.
I've yet to even broach the aspect of importing each giant bundle into immich because I've not had success in even grabbing the takeout files correctly, but would LOVE pointers on the best way of importing the roughly 700gb into the database without it ALL going wrong.
I've had great success with immich running in docker for the past year or so, although I have yet to upgrade to the newest version. Google photos backups have been disabled on my phone for a year or so, but I yet to haul in all of the past years.
Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud".
Great software.
If you can get all the images into a filesystem (on a NAS or similar server share), you can use the External Libraries feature in Immich (https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/). This allows it to crunch through the media files via an async import job (a bit more reliable than having to directly upload via the web api).
In my setup, I exclusively use the external libraries feature, pointed at a read-only share from my NAS mounted onto my Immich server. (The external libraries are set to resynchronize to the database every few hours). This means I can manage all my media assets myself without worrying about Immich accidentally corrupting them, and if I eventually move off Immich, I just have a single folder of media files organized by date to port around.
The only downside is that I don't directly upload any media files directly to Immich, but that's okay. I have Syncopoli sync files from my phones (on a scheduled cadence) to an intermediary server which organizes and cleans exif data from media files before dropping it into its permanent home on my NAS share. No manual steps to get photos from my phone to my Immich instance!
This is a good usage pattern if you're absolutely married to the file structure you have and/or want to keep using the files where they are.
Not really applicable if what you have is a google takeout dump. Better in that case to import all the photos and let immich handle them moving forward using a tool like https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
I went through the same path as you - I think I even landed up with 14 takeout files as well!
Its a bit of a trial, but quite doable. Its likely that things have improved since I did it about 6 months ago.
*Getting the files from takeout* I tried downloading the files onto my laptop via a browser, and then copying them over to my NAS, but quickly gave up. The best approach is to download them directly to the NAS. As you pointed out auth/cookies is an issue. There are multiple ways of solving the issue, but for me I found the best way was to use chromes dev console network view to identify the network request for each file, then right click on it and select "Copy cURL". SSH into my nas and use that command to download the file. There is a bit more info on how to do this here:
https://trog.qgl.org/20241001/downloading-a-google-takeout-f...
*Importing them into immich*
Once I had all my takeout files on the nas, I used immich-go to import them: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
This took a bit of tweaking to get the right set of command line args that worked well for what I wanted it to do. I also found immich errored out a few times during the import. Fortunately immich-go can just pick up the import where it left of, so I kept re-running it until everything was imported.
*Cleaning it all up* If you just want a huge flat dump of your files your probably good. In my case there were various things I wasn't quite happy about. The default handling of stacking edited images with the originals in albums wasn't what I was after. I wanted to replicate sharing of albums with immich users to match what I had in google photos. For all this kind of cleanup work, I found it quite helpful to work with an AI agent. Give it an API key for your server + the url and get it to help you write cleanup scripts.
> Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud".
See the release note that this HN thread links to ;-)
>>> Background backup improvements Background backup on Android is now significantly more reliable. Previously, the background backup on Android was limited to newly taken photos. Now, the app uses a new periodic task scheduler, which allows you to upload your entire library in the background, and it plays nicer with Android's background execution limits, properly cleans up tasks, and warns you when battery optimization and notification settings might interfere with backups.
On iOS, the background refresh task now runs its sync and upload work in parallel, so uploads actually start within the short time window iOS allows.
You can use this tool to get them into Immich, it will parse all the metadata and recreate albums as you have in GPhotos https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
Oh wow, it recreates the Google Photos albums? That's the first time I've heard of a tool doing that. I've spent a ton of time organizing my Google Photos albums, that's a big reason I stay with it.
Likely not the best approach:
I had ~200GiB. I selected below 10k files at a time to upload in the web UI (selected all 2014, then 2015). It was fine. More than that many and the UI became unusable.
External Libraries seem like a good option.
They have also recently improved the background import in the Android app so I have heard so that might be worth a try.
immich-go has what you need
This! When you have the pictures on your disk just use immich-go to import them.
Just a quick note that native windows extract is 32bit and dies on archives gt 4gb. Use 7zip or something to extract in case you happen to be using that one.