I have about 600 GB of photos and videos in Google Photos, and my wife has twice that. We already have a Synology. Just need to move nearly 2 TB of family photos over. That was six months ago.
Since then, it’s been the same cycle: start an export, find problems, try to fix them with scripts, run into more problems, give up. A month later, work up the energy to try again.
By now I’ve tried probably every free method out there, and once, out of desperation, I even paid for one. Some fix the dates but don’t write all the metadata back to the files. Then there are albums, duplicates, and figuring out which Takeout JSON belongs to which photo.
The most frustrating part was having to keep my computer running. Every new attempt meant processing the export again and leaving it on day and night. I couldn’t just shut it down and forget about it. Meanwhile, the NAS sat in the cupboard unaware that I’d expected it to handle this out of the box.
I appreciate the work people have put into these tools, but I still hadn’t finished the move. I’m not going to manually check nearly 2 TB of files, and I really don’t want to discover missing videos or broken albums a year from now.
I don’t have a finished app yet, but I’ve managed to put together what feels like the ideal set of scripts for a genuinely complete migration. It’s not rocket science, but it’s eaten up an enormous amount of time. I’ve now migrated my own library with them, my wife’s is next.
I’m posting this so I don’t put it off for another month: I’m committing to turning these scripts into a Synology app and using it to fully migrate and verify both our libraries.