Thoughts after migration from Google Photos to Apple photos/icloud
I now have a clearer picture on how this works, after doing a direct transfer from google takeout to a iCloud test account tied to my family storage. What I see from this test practice is the following
- HEIC files transfered from Google are HEIF after transfer, they are also different in sizes - this makes them re-upload to Google Photos as duplicates if Google Photos sync is not turned off
- Albums transfered are a lot more than the source, haven't seen through all names and so on, but seems like there are duplicates. only some of them contains pictures though, so seems like they are the "real ones"
- on the positive side, apple photos detects a lot of duplicates so far, that Google Photos haven't "said" anything about.
With these experiences in mind I have the following plan to do a proper migration:
situation today: my wifi and I share one google photos account for all our photos.
- Decide on a cutover date
- at cutover date, disable Google Photos sync on both our phones
- start Google Takeout transfer to iCloud after disabling Google Photos sync
- Use Google Photos as a read only source until transfer is complete (about a week)
- Start using iCloud/apple photos for 6 months, then do a decision on what to do long term.
If we don't like apple photos enough I will do manual upload of the last 6 months, delete iCloud Photos and then re-enable Google Photos sync.
One caveat with all of this is that we have had iCloud Photos running for 2-3 years on both our accounts, so takeout might create duplicates for these years. Haven't decided how I will do this, either delete everything in iCloud first, then start over again or just hope that apple photos duplicate detection is good enough to fix them all. a third option might be to add all photos in Google Photos to yearly albums and use them when transferring