Move a Google Takeout to Immich with the dates inside the files

Two ways in: upload or external library

Uploading copies the files into Immich's own storage. The web app has an upload button, and the command line tool (installed with npm i -g @immich/cli, signed in with immich login and your server address and API key) uploads whole folders: immich upload --recursive takes subfolders too, which it skips by default, and --album makes one album per folder name. --dry-run shows what would be uploaded first.

An external library leaves the files where they are: the folder is mounted into the immich-server container, read-only if you like, and Immich scans it, once a day by default. Immich's docs say that metadata edited in Immich for an external asset is stored only inside Immich, not written to the file, and that a file changed on disk shows up after the next library scan. So write the fixed files first and point the library at them, rather than fixing a folder Immich has already scanned.

Time zones

Immich's TZ setting is only a fallback for when the time zone cannot be determined from the image metadata. The fixer writes the offset (OffsetTimeOriginal) into each JPEG next to the date, so the moment is in the file and not left to the server's setting.

Where immich-go fits

Immich's documentation points people with a Google Takeout to immich-go, a community-maintained tool that reads the JSON files while it uploads. That works for Immich only. The fixer takes the other route: the dates go into the files themselves, so the same folder also reads correctly in a file manager, on another server or in a backup.

How to do it

1. 1Add every .zip part of your Takeout below, or the folder you extracted them to.
2. 2Check the preview, pick the time zone if needed, and write the fixed files to a folder or a ZIP.
3. 3Upload: run immich upload --recursive --album with the fixed folder (after immich login), or use the web app's upload button.
4. 4Or as an external library: copy the fixed folder to the server, mount it into the immich-server container and add it as an external library.
5. 5Open a few assets in Immich and check their date and location.

Known pitfalls

• Fixing files Immich has already imported does not move them on the timeline by itself: uploaded assets are copies, and an external library needs a rescan. Fix first, import second.
• immich upload does not go into subfolders unless you add --recursive. A Takeout is all subfolders.
• Immich does not modify original files; dates you edit in Immich go into .xmp sidecar files, and in a read-only external library no sidecar can be written, so dates and locations there cannot be edited. That is one more reason to have the right date in the file before Immich sees it.
• HEIC, PNG, WebP and GIF files are copied unchanged in this version, so they reach Immich with whatever date is already inside them. The report lists the ones that had none.

Questions

Sources

The app-specific steps and behaviour above were checked against these official pages:

• Immich docs: command line interface (immich upload)
• Immich docs: external libraries
• Immich docs: jobs and workers (metadata extraction)
• Immich docs: XMP sidecars
• Immich docs: FAQ
• Immich docs: environment variables (TZ)