Ideally, you want to run these commands and manage the import of files while they are located on the on-board SSD storage (unless you have a fast SSD external drive), running these commands while the files are on a slow disk drive will take a long-ass-time, but is certainly possible.

If you have a lot of photos/videos in Google then you’re going to need to manage your storage on your mac carefully. I picked 10Gb and so over a period of time downloaded each one.

The first step is of course to actually get your data out of Google, you can ask for it in whatever size files you want. All commands were run on my mac, locally - If you’re using Apple photos and you’re not on a Mac, you’re going to have a bad time. I’ve omitted some of the obvious steps, so engage brain before following this. Here’s a very simple overview of the steps that I took, to get my pictures into Apple. I also found a bunch of files that where the exif data was just broken but could be repaired. json file of the same name - which Apple doesn’t read. Also, some files will retain their exif data (date/time, GPS, etc) but not all, those that don’t google will have moved it to a. If you have custom albums, photos are exported in the ‘date’ directories and then also exported in the ‘custom’ album directories - so you either need to ignore the custom albums or check for duplicates. It was a massive pain, because Google Takeout doesn’t give you your photos in a very sensible way. Moving from Google Photos to Apple PhotosĪ while back I moved all my photos from Google Photos to Apple Photos.

Exiftool recursive directories