How to move local Apple Photos.app library to Google Photos?

January 30, 2020 5:56 PM

How do I successfully migrate two very large Photos.app libraries of photos & videos to Google Photos? And how do you tell what pictures or videos the uploader missed, when it doesn't get everything the first time?

My wife has two big Photos.app libraries of pictures & videos on her Mac Mini *, and wants to have everything backed up in the cloud. Google Photos seems like a good choice, but when we tried it last year the uploader gagged on many items without ever really explaining what the problem was nor how to fix it.

She has well over 300Gb of stuff, so this is not trivial. (I do, too, and eventually I'll be repeating this whole process myself!)

She wants to have her pictures backed up in the cloud, and in a spot where she can send links to people to see them. We pay for extra iCloud storage now, so paying for extra Google storage wouldn't be out of the question (probably the $99/year for Tb). We are fine with having the Google Photos iOS app backup all the phone pictures to the web, and then use the desktop app to backup the cameras. Not using Photos.app again will not break my heart. :7)

She mostly takes pictures on her (recent) iPhone, and she uses a Canon DSLR on special occasions like holidays, school events, sports, etc. I take pictures on my iPhone, and a lot of video and pictures on a Lumix point-and-shoot. (Either way, we don't exceed the 16Mb/1080p limits on Google Photos.)

I believe that I need to select everything in the library and then Export Unmodified Originals To Disk, and then point the Google "Backup and Sync" utility at that central collection point. Is this correct?

If anyone has personal experience -- or better suggestions than this plan -- I would be very grateful to hear them!

*=At some point, iPhotos.app or Photos.app created a second library, and now I have two giant sets of possibly-overlapping pctures to try to reconcile. Oh, joy.

posted by wenestvedt to Technology (4 answers total)

So it used to be that you could just put the files in a Google Drive folder on your computer and it would automatically sync with Google Photos as well as Drive. Now after you've synced them in Drive you have to manually import them into Photos which is a pain and I wouldn't recommend doing it for 300Gb of photos. I haven't changed my workflow to this new reality but all of the big uploading was done years ago and now I'm just importing a hundred or so photos at a time from Drive to Photos which isn't that bad - I'm just annoyed that I have to do it because perfectly good functionality was removed for no good reason.

One Drive has similar functionality to what Google Drive and Photos used to do. I don't think the photo album side of things is as featured as Google Photos but you'll be able to share a link and show photos.

I have One Drive through a Microsoft 365 subscription which in some ways is a better deal than Google Drive as you can have up to 5 people in your "family" get accounts and they each get 1Tb of storage space for less than the cost of a 2Tb plan with Google One. Each family member also gets to download and use Office which may be a useful benefit too.

Both Google Photos and One Drive have apps for copying the pictures from your phones automatically. I don't have a Mac so I'm not sure if there are apps/services for syncing folders to One Drive or Google Drive but I would expect there to be.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:40 PM on January 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Drive/Photos integration changed in July of last year, so it's not quite as simple as "upload to Drive and it will be in Photos" but still not that difficult.
posted by kdar at 9:14 PM on January 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

I believe that I need to select everything in the library and then Export Unmodified Originals To Disk, and then point the Google "Backup and Sync" utility at that central collection point. Is this correct?

This is what I did since I couldn't find any better way. I just let it do its thing for a few days. Keep in mind it won't hold on to any album or folder structure and any tags or descriptions will be lost.
posted by bondcliff at 6:06 AM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I just pointed backup and sync at the Photos.app library directory. Secretly, the database of images for Photos.app is *already* a directory hierarchy on disk, so backup and sync was able to find all the files. I did this also for an old iPhoto directory and Google Photos did a good job of not adding tons of duplicates, despite the fact that Photos.app and iPhoto had a bunch of photos in common.

On my mac the backup and sync utility rescans all the directories on restart, so if photos are being missed after the initial upload is fully done and the machine has been rebooted (restarting backup and sync forces a rescan IIRC, and rebooting will definitely restart backup and sync), then the problem is different from just "it missed it the first time".

(Full disclosure: I work at Google but I do not work on Google Photos).
posted by pmb at 8:52 AM on January 31, 2020 [2 favorites]