Moving from Google Photos to Jottacloud

Moving Military Train by Vonuló trén

Two weeks ago, I moved all my 20k+ photos from Google Photos to Jottacloud.

In this issue of Dreamscape, I write about why and how I switched to a different service.

Enjoy!

Why

I’ve been a happy user of Google Photos for the past 10 years. Why switch?

Google is an advertising company.

In recent years I’ve become more and more aware of this, and would rather spend the money I’m already using on smaller companies that offer technologies without targeted advertisements.

Another one of the reasons for switching is because I dislike how Google locks you in to their ecosystem.

Google makes moving away from their services (email, photos, drive, etc.) super difficult, forcing it’s users to keep using their products.

The more data you have, the more difficult it is to switch services.

It’s easier to move today, instead of putting it of for yet another year.

File based storage

I’ve been taking less and less photos on my phone, and more and more on digital and analog cameras, storing the images and scans in a file based storage system.

The folder structure I store my photos and videos in looks something like this:

/[camera]/[date]/*.jpeg

Google Photos uses a folder and tagging based storage system, which does not fit well with my physical storage on my hard-drives.

Jottacloud

As for an alternative, I ended up choosing Jottacloud.

It is Norwegian, uses a file based storage system, and it has a web app showing all photos in a timeline.

The photo timeline features an AI-search feature similar to the one in Google Photos, and I’ve been happy with it since the switch.

The Migration Process

How do you get started moving twenty thousand photos?

Google does not make it easy.

I used a combination of two methods:

Downloading Albums

For years with “few” photos taken (less than 3000), the easiest way of getting my photos was to put all the photos from this year in one big album. This album could then be downloaded.

The alternative would be to use Google Takeout. The downside to this is that Google Takeout does not automatically preserve the photos metadata.

Using this album method however, keeps the metadata intact. The biggest struggle with this method was the manual process of selecting all the photos from a given year.

Google Takeout

For the years with a lot of photos and videos, the album method did not work.

I asked for a the remaining photos and videos through Google Takeout, and got 96 zip files, all being 2GB each.

After the long download process, I would unzip and use the tool GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper to fix the missing metadata from the downloaded files.

This was a time consuming process, and I have a hard time seeing how anyone without technical competence and a lot of free time would be able to figure this out...

The tool worked as expected, except that all live photos would be put in the /Date Unknown folder after being processed. I could recognize them as live photos, as they were named IMG_xxxxx.MP4.

My solution to fixing this was to delete them all. Goodbye live photos!