Collecting Nerd Points by Migrating from Google Photos to Nextcloud & Memories
I recently set up a local Nextcloud instance (yes, there are encrypted off-site backups) to maintain and share some stuff. Now I want to see how well the Memories app can replace Google Photos.1
Step 1: Exporting from Google
Google’s Takeout makes it easy to export what you need. It can take a few days though: requesting about 200 GB of images and videos took four days for the download links to be ready. Google also doesn’t provide a way to easily obtain and import the download links into a download manager. Or any other way to more easily manage the process of downloading potentially tens or hundreds of archives.
[!WARNING] Be aware of where you store the data! Directly storing and cleaning it within Nextcloud’s data dir will put a strain on Nextcloud’s indexing and potentially blow up backup size.
Either stop Nextcloud or do the data wrangling somewhere else.
But wait - there are more quirks once all archives are extracted!
Pictures are sorted into folders per year and custom albums are simply represented as folders with literal copies of the images.
ls --format single-column
'Photos from 2023'
'Photos from 2024'
'Photos from 2025'
'My Album'
'Another Album'
cd‘ing into an album reveals that metadata is stored as JSON for each image and album.
ls --format single-column | tail -n 3
DSC_0944.JPG
DSC_0944.JPG.supplemental-metadata.json
metadata.json
cat DSC_0944.JPG.supplemental-metadata.json
{
"title": "DSC_0944.JPG",
"description": "",
"imageViews": "14",
"creationTime": {
"timestamp": "1586306999",
"formatted": "Apr 8, 2020, 12:49:59 AM UTC"
},
"photoTakenTime": {
"timestamp": "1586308187",
"formatted": "Apr 8, 2020, 1:09:47 AM UTC"
},
"geoData": {
"latitude": 0.0,
"longitude": 0.0,
"altitude": 0.0,
"latitudeSpan": 0.0,
"longitudeSpan": 0.0
},
...
Step 2: Cleanup
If you don’t care about custom albums, this step is easy: just delete all folders not following the “Photos from YYYY” pattern:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name 'Photos from [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]' ! -name . -exec rm -r {} \;
If you’d rather delete the duplicates in the yearly folders and keep your albums you can use my script. It has a few more features that I’ll talk about later.
We can skip the metadata cleanup here since Memories can take care of it - see below.
Step 3: Importing into Nextcloud
Move the data into the correct Nextcloud user. Assuming Nextcloud’s data directory is mounted at /store-all-the-things it should look something like:
rsync --progress -avz <your path> '/store-all-the-things/<username>/files/Photos/Google Photos'
Now make sure the permissions are set correctly:
chown -R www-data:www-data Google\ Photos/
Next, make the files known to Nextcloud via occ files:scan. If you’re running Nextcloud AIO:
docker exec -u www-data -it nextcloud-aio-nextcloud php occ files:scan <username>
Lastly, as promised earlier, let Memories take care of migrating the metadata from Google’s JSON into EXIF:
docker exec --user www-data -it nextcloud-aio-nextcloud php occ memories:migrate-google-takeout -u <username> -f /Photos/Google\ Photos
[!WARNING] The scan and migrate commands can take a long time depending on the size of your data. Be sure to limit it to the user and/or paths in question. For me, working on 200 GB did not result in significant slowdowns though. See occ documentation for details.
Done!
Now I’m going to test-drive this for a while until I finally commit and close my Google Photos account. It will happen someday, I swear!
Note: if files are not showing up in Memories, try:
docker exec -u www-data -it nextcloud-aio-nextcloud php occ memories:index -u <username>