this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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https://takeout.google.com/
Export your photos with take out
Then use immich-go to import
https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
Note that immich go doesn't need you to extract the zip files. Also, you can set each file to 50GB making everything a lot easier.
Definitely do this. I ended up with the default file size value, which gave me thousands of files to download.
Immich go can accept wild cards fyi. Toss all those in a directory and point it at that.
Yeah that part was fine. The uploading parts wasn't the problem - it was clicking through and downloading all the takeout files that was made easier by maxing out the zip size option.
Does that properly keep metadata like location and other exit entries? I recall google takeout used to suck at that. I had to export using their web UI 1000 at a time or so back in the day to keep that info.
For the ones I imported it seems like the location data is still there
Yes
I was too lazy and immich-go may not have existed when I migrated but I just selected and downloaded my pictures from Google Photos then just uploaded them to Immich and they seemed to keep all their metadata.
Right, the problem only happened on google checkout for me.
This so usually stored on the photos as exif data
Right, sorry that's what I meant to type which got corrected to "exit". When I tried it it would be exported as a separate set of json files instead of being part of the images. Glad to hear that's not the case any longer or that this tool can automatically handle it.
This is the answer.
Additional ideas: I happened to be on Synology and wanted to download google takeout files directly from Google to the nas. So I ran an instance of chromium in docker and used that browser to download the 50gb takeout files directly to the nas.
Take note of the size of your immich library before and after you import with immich go, and how big the takeout files are before using immich go. If you miss a few files you'll know because of the size discrepancy.
i second this too amazing tool
Found it the hard way.. Extracted the zips,and deleted; just to find out I gotta download em again or compress it