Purging Google Photos

For the past half of the year, I've been on a tear to rid myself of any ties I've had to US-based tech. Among the first things to go were my subscriptions, one of which was for Google One, which I held purely for the additional storage space. I've been using Gmail for nearly 20 years, Drive for nearly 15, and Photos has probably had every picture I'd ever taken on my phone backed up on it for over a decade. So naturally, the storage starts to add up.

Immediately upon cancelling, I start getting harassed through notifications and email that my storage is over the 15GB limit, and if I don't rectify this, Google's going to start deleting. Fair enough, some of it was easy enough to clear up. I'm a digital hoarder, disorganized, and a lot of what Drive was being used for was just to transfer schoolwork, so that could all go. I had a couple projects stored on there for posterity from back before I was ever using git, so that was another easy solution. A lot of duplicate videos stored between Photos and Drive, so those could easily go too. By the end of my purge, I managed to get things down to 14.8GB. Enough to not lose anything, with a little wiggle room to not have to worry about email service getting interrupted, and I can deal with this properly later.

But no. This was still not enough. Constant emails and push notification from Google that I am at 98% capacity. I understood the messaging; surely someone would want to know if their storage was near a point of requiring immediate action if they were actually dependent on the service, but given that I had decided that I wasn't going to be making further use of Photos or Drive, it wasn't a huge concern for me. I'm terrible at managing my inbox though, so it seemed ironic to me that the frequency of the emails may have served to make the warnings into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All this was kind of pushed to the backburner because I wasn't really sure how to proceed. Manually downloading things I wanted to keep (beyond what I had already done) seemed like a daunting task, and I hadn't really taken the time to do any research into tools or alternatives. Luckily for me, Trump started to really ramp up the rhetoric around the annexation of Greenland, prompting a lot of Europeans to start getting as interested in divorcing themselves of US products and services as Canadians have been. A lot of posts circulated about alternatives to US tech. Up until then, not a lot had caught my attention because so many of them seemed to be "use some other provider's service instead", but it did expose me to a lot more options.

Enter immich. This seemed like a perfect solution to (at the very least) replace Photos: I could self host the server which would house all my photos and videos, and it even has an accompanying mobile app which will automatically synchronize the photos and videos I take with my phone. To top it all off, there's even existing solutions for uploading everything from Google Photos to immich. I could even make it public and provide it as an alternvative service for family. I could have it all done in a day!

Google would not make it so easy. The immich-go tool works by uploading the contents of your archives downloaded from Google Takeout. This is Google's service which purportedly allows you to retrieve copies of your data. "Your account, your data", as the page claims. So I request a copy of all of my data from Photos, and get to uploading via immich-go. The upload seems to go off without a hitch, as I can clearly see photos appearing on the immich app on my phone, and I'm quite pleased that it's all going so smoothly. I figure "alright, that's done now", and go to start deleting everything off of Google Photos. Only, something doesn't seem quite right. I notice that pictures from the very top of my collection, from as recently as this month are on Google Photos, but I hadn't noticed them on the immich app. Did it fail to upload everything? I run the immich-go again, but it reports that there's nothing to update/upload and I notice that it's telling me there's metadata that is missing. So I start digging through the downloads provided by Google and notice there's tons of metadata that has no image file associated, and vice versa. Turns out that Google Takout just seems to... not be able to handle large volumes of Photos well? I managed to find tons of other examples of other people facing similar issues. It wasn't clear to me if the issue was the the files are simply not there, or if they're just sort of jumbled around, split up between the many zips that were provided as a part of the export. Either way, it was a stupid amount of data to try and pore over to try and guess as to the root of the problem, and as is often the case, the Google support threads that I found were just filled with other users providing wild speculation, "works for me"s, and not a peep from Google itself.

My best guess as to the problem is that the service just chokes up on large volumes of files. What wound up working for me in the end was to do takeouts year-by-year rather than all at once, as that broke the exports into smaller pieces. So my process became:

1. Request takeout of Google Photos data, only selecting "Photos from 20XX".
2. Upload the takeout to my immich server via immich-go.
3. Peruse Google Photos for that year, only deleting everything that I could see had successfully been uploaded to the immich server.
4. If there were still any photos that were missed, repeat from 1 for the same year, otherwise repeat from 1 for the following year.

This was, of course, a very tedious and time-consuming process that I wound up spreading out over the course of a few evenings. If there were any trust left to lose in Google, this certainly would have eroded any little I had left. I could have very easily missed that some photos hadn't uploaded, and gone and deleted everything, putting blind faith in the efficacy of Google's supposed backup tools. I would have lost so many photos and videos of my beloved 18 year old cat who I will one day sorely miss.

Since this ultimately became a very iterative experience, one thing I found amusing is that I continued to get the storage warning emails well into the 76% range. At that point, it seemed less about being proactive, and clearly more about trying to manipulate you into paying a subscription fee. In the end though, this just serves as an important reminder that "the cloud" is actually just "somebody else's computer", and you're putting a lot of blind faith in the appropriate care being taken with the custody of your data.

In terms of immich, I am happy to report that it works exactly the way that I needed, and then some. I can still generate share links to share photos and videos with others, both privately (by setting a password for the link) and publicly. Multiple accounts can exist on the server, so my wife can upload photos and then share an album with me. It even generates "memories", and it has a search function you can use to make finding specific photos easier. For backups, it's as simple as anything else I have on a local machine: copy the files onto another hard drive. I'd definitely encourage anyone seeking a solution for photo synchronization on their devices to give it a try.