Migrate to Google Photos and preserve albums

Question

Level 1

26 points

Migrate to Google Photos and preserve albums

I recently migrated my entire 78gb Apple Photos collection to Google Photos, but I was unable to find any way to preserve albums. Now Google Photos is a free-for-all, and I hate trying to find things in it. For reasons beyond the scope of this post though, I'm not willing to go back. I *AM*, however, willing to delete everything in Google Photos and then re-migrate again if I can find a way to keep photos in their albums.

I'm not opposed to spending good money to do this. It's worth it to keep the organizational structure of my photo library.

I don't care about preserving facial recognition/names, key photo tags, favorite tags, etc.

Would be nice to keep hierarchical folder/album structures, I can deal with albums only if need be.

If there are intermediaries I can use, I'm open to it. In other words, if I can't go from Apple to Google while preserving album structure, but I can go from Apple to XYZ to Google, I'm happy to do that even if I have to buy a license for the intermediary. I do already have Lightroom, within which I keep all my professional libraries. I also have the last version of Aperture though I'm not currently using it.

My Apple Photos library is locally stored; I don't keep any of it in iCloud.

Thoughts?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), Early 2013, 15", 2.8 Ghz, 16 GB

Posted on Jan 20, 2017 2:16 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

dantrimble Author

Level 1

26 points

Jan 22, 2017 12:37 PM in response to dantrimble

For anyone looking for the answer, I have a solution here that worked great.

1. Use the following AppleScript to automatically export all of your Apple Photos albums into a folder structure: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-9561. It needs a little tweaking, but it works great.

2. It will put all albums into a single folder. Go into that folder, and create new subfolders and move the exported album folders into them to match up to the nested structure used in your Apple Photos database. When done, you'll have a folder structure on your hard drive of all of your images in folders named to their album name, and structured the way you have them in Apple Photos.

3. Go to https://www.picbackman.com/. This awesome software will upload photos in any folder tree you specify to any of a dozen and a half services from Google Photos to SmugMug, Flickr, Amazon S3, you name it. It has a free version, but for only $5.95 a month (cancellable at any time), you get some really worthy premium features, including uploading 5 files simultaneously to speed it up. It also creates folders and albums on the destination service named according to the folders holding your photos locally.

I have PicBackman running right now to upload all 86GB of photos exported by the AppleScript. It is doing everything for me automagically, simultaneously sending up every photo to my Google Photos, SmugMug, and Amazon S3 accounts. Pure awesomesauce.

Problem solved.

Reply