How to move from Google Photos to Immich: a practical migration guide

Quick comparison

RAM figures are catalog estimates from our tests.

Before you start

• Check the official requirements: Immich currently recommends 8 GB RAM and 4 CPU cores (6 GB and 2 cores minimum). It can run on 4 GB only with machine learning disabled.
• Plan storage: your Takeout export plus 10-20% for thumbnails and transcoded video. The database (usually 1-3 GB) must be on a local SSD, not a network share.
• Immich recommends Docker on a normal Linux host or a full VM. Docker inside an LXC container is not recommended by the project, so a VM is the safer choice on Proxmox.
• Do not cancel Google storage or delete anything from Google Photos until the checks at the end are done.

Migration steps

1. Install Immich with the official docker-compose.yml and .env from the Immich documentation, or use the compose file on our Immich page as a starting point. Create the admin account.
2. Open Google Takeout, select only Google Photos and export. Choose ZIP files and a larger archive size, then download every part.
3. In Immich, go to your account settings and create an API key.
4. Download the immich-go tool from its official releases page and follow its README for the from-google-photos command. It matches each photo with its JSON metadata so dates, locations, descriptions and albums are kept.
5. Import in smaller batches if your library is large, and keep the original Takeout files until the end.
6. Install the Immich mobile app, log in, and turn on automatic backup for the camera folders you want.

What to check before you cancel Google

• Compare the number of photos and videos in Immich with Google Photos.
• Spot-check dates, locations and a few albums, including old photos and screenshots.
• Open some videos and live photos on both web and phone.
• Wait for Immich background jobs (thumbnails, face recognition, search indexing) to finish before judging search quality.

Honest caveats

• Self-hosting means you own the backups. Immich is not a backup by itself: keep the database dump and the upload folder on a second disk and a copy somewhere else (the 3-2-1 idea).
• Our catalog figure follows the official recommendation of 8 GB RAM. It is not our own measurement, and real usage grows with library size, so plan for more if yours is large.
• Takeout is not perfect. Some metadata can be missing or mismatched, which is why we keep the originals and verify first.
• Google Photos features such as some editing tools and shared-album behavior differ in Immich.
• We have not benchmarked Immich with a GPU. A dedicated GPU is optional and can speed up machine learning jobs, but we are not publishing numbers we have not measured.