![]() When asked, do not enable automatic backup.Grab an iDevice and turn on iCloud Photos.With that, here is the actual process of moving from Google Photos to iCloud Photos: Moving from Google Photos to iCloud Photos Unfortunately, it doesn’t support HEIC/HEIF, so my point still stands - don’t use Google Takeout. Update: Apparently, there already is a Python script that merges the metadata for you. When I tried this method, my photo library got completely messed up - some of the photos surfaced to the top because of the incorrect date set in the metadata, and a lot of duplicate entries were created because of the HEIC/HEIF bug. So if you’re the poor soul who didn’t know any of these gotchas and used Google Takeout to import your photos and videos into iCloud, you’re in for a very nasty surprise. However, if your photo is in a HEIC/HEIF format, then Photos will create two separate entries and not merge the photos and videos back into a “live photo.” In short, if your photos are in JPG/PNG format and your “live photos” video is in MP4, then it will merge cleanly back into a “live photo” once you import the two files back into the Photos app on your Mac. But why does Google do this metadata-stripping in the first place? What about people that can’t write up scripts when they export their files? This is horrible!Īnother catch with this method is that it won’t preserve some “live photos” - although this is probably more of an Apple bug than a Google bug. Sure, I could probably make a script to “merge” the metadata back into the media files. For other photos and videos, the metadata is mangled, and the date of the metadata is set to the archival date. json file outlining the duplicate metadata. And frustratingly, some photos and videos do in fact preserve metadata - while still having a separate. json file that sits next to your original file with the same file name. ![]() Rather, they’ll “split” the metadata into a separate. Unfortunately, Google Takeout is a steaming pile of garbage, in that it actually discards all of the media metadata when exporting your archive. My first attempt at moving photos/videos from Google Photos to iCloud Photos involved Google Takeout to first export the photos. Unfortunately, going the other way around is a difficult process, which is really, really ironic. Once done, uninstall Google Photos and delete your photos/videos from iCloud Photos if you wish.Turn on Google Photos backup and wait until all the photos/videos are backed up to the cloud.If you don’t do this, photos/videos that you upload to Google Photos will be the “optimized” version, which means it will look like crap. When asked, select to download all photos/videos back to your device in original quality. This is really easy if you still have your iDevice around. Here are some of the things I learned while using Google/iCloud Photos: Moving from iCloud Photos to Google Photos !Warning: This post is over 365 days old.
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