I Ditched Google Photos

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  • timeliner

    All your digital life on a single timeline, stored locally -- DEPRECATED, SEE TIMELINIZE (link below)

  • Heya! I'm the author of PhotoStructure, and my Google Photos account (before I started working on PhotoStructure) is about that size, too.

    I wrote up some tips here: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/

    This is what I did:

    1. First try to fetch all your Google Photos via Takeout in one archive. If it fails (like it did for me), try different-sized .tgz archives. I had to use the 10 Gb option (using 50gb caused an internal-to-google error).

    If that fails to work, the last resort is to manually create by-year albums, shove all photos from that year into that album, and do a takeout of just that album. Repeat as necessary for every year.

    2. Install an app on your phone to *directly* upload the original photos and videos from your phone to your NAS/home server. I have several recommended apps here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...

    At this point, you can still use Google Photos (for viewing and as a last-ditch backup), but your originals are safe (without all the Google Photo downsampling and metadata shenanigans), and you're free to use whatever self-hosted software you want (like PhotoStructure, but there are a ton of alternatives, as well).

    FWIW, I also tried this software: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner -- it does what it can, but the files you get via the API has a bunch of metadata stripped from it. I even had captured-at times get mangled with older photos.

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