How to breakup with Google Photos
I've been using Google Photos to store my images since getting my first Android phone in 2015, and even continued to use it after I later switched to iPhone.
This meant I had a massive amount of photos stored in Google's cloud and was paying a monthly subscription fee to keep them there. As part of my recent project to self-host all of my data, I decided to find a way to finally free myself from Google's services.
The quickest and easiest way to mass download your photos (or any of your data really...) from Google is using Google Takeout which will allow you to download multiple .zip files with all of your photos. However, if you're like me and used the storage saver option, you'll find yourself with hundreds of little folders with weird .json files inside. These files contain all of the metadata that belongs with your photos and no obvious way to merge them together.
Fortunately, someone wrote a script for that.
TheLastGimbusGoogle Takeout Photo Helper is a easy to use script available for multiple platforms that merges all of the metadata back into your photos. I'll leave it up to the README to explain how to use it rather than write it all here.
Once completed, I was able to import all of my photos into Synology photos with all of the metadata intact. Mileage may vary depending on your storage solution of choice.
Then came the matter of removing all of my photos from Google, which naturally... they don't make easy. I certainly wasn't going to spend my time manually selecting and deleting thousands upon thousands of photos.
Fortunately, someone made an extension for that.
By default there is a limit of 200 deletions per day, however you can upgrade for a small one time fee which is well worth it for how easy this tool makes the process and well deserved by the developer.
Finally I've managed to pry at least a small amount of my data away from Google and onto my own server.