How to migrate Google Photos to Proton Drive Photos

Proton Drive just released their photo syncing feature on Android. I've been patiently waiting for this since Drive came out.

In this post I'm going to explain a an easy way to migrate your data from Google Photos to Proton Drive.

This will get outdated quickly as I'm sure they will integrate a better migration service, but until then this should work.

First step is to go to takeout.google.com and download all of your Photos data.

You will eventually receive an email with a link to download all your photos.

Once downloaded, you can unzip all your pictures with this command:

UNZIP_DISABLE_ZIPBOMB_DETECTION=TRUE unzip <takeout-filename.zip>

Now you have a nested set of directories with many pictures in them. I recommend deleting all directories that don't have a name like Photos from 2010 as the rest are from albums which are likely duplicated in the Photos from XXXX files.

Now you will be left with all your photos as well as some json metadata files, which contain some info about when the photos were taken.

You could now, upload all the photos to Proton Drive via the web interface. Unfortunately, the photos will all be in the wrong order as they are sorted by the file creation date (which will be today) instead of the date the photo was taken. Also some files could have missing timestamp data.

Thankfully, there is a really cool tool called google-photos-takeout-helper. So you can go ahead and install that, and then run this command to sort all the timestamps:

google-photos-takeout-helper -i Takeout -o FixedTakeout

This will copy all the files to FixedTakeout with the correct metadata.

Now that this is done, we can finally upload the folder to the Proton Drive Photos service, and they should hopefully be in chronological order.

At the time of writing this post however, there is an annoying bug with the photo upload feature on the web interface which causes many failures.

So a better option, would be to copy all these files to your Android device, and select the new folder to be backed up to Photos, in the Drive settings page.