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Leaving Google Photos for Immich: keep your dates, keep backups running, share with family

The move from Google Photos to Immich goes wrong in four quiet places. Takeout imports that land ten years of photos on today's date, phone backups that stall, one shared family login, and a reverse proxy that chokes on big videos. Here is the fix for each, plus a checklist.

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Leaving Google Photos for Immich: keep your dates, keep backups running, share with family

Getting Immich running is the easy part. The library is up, the timeline looks like Google Photos, and the first test photo shows up from your phone. The move itself is where it quietly goes wrong, and none of these problems throw an error. Ten years of photos land on today's date. The phone stops backing up and nobody notices for a month. The whole family shares one login, so face recognition and memories turn into a mess. A long video from your phone fails to upload through the proxy for no obvious reason.

This post walks through the migration in order. It assumes Immich is already installed the documented way, with the library on the data disk and the database on local SSD.

Before the first upload: storage template and a normal account

Two settings have to happen before anything goes in, because they are painful to change later.

The storage template. By default Immich stores files in folders named by internal IDs. Go to Administration → Settings → Storage Template and turn it on with a pattern like year/month/day. Your library on disk becomes a readable folder tree, which matters a lot the day you want to browse it without Immich or move to something else.

A normal account. The first user you create is the administrator. Use a strong, unique password for it, save it somewhere safe, and then create a separate, normal account for daily use. The phone app logs in with the normal account, never the admin one.

Trap 1: uploading the raw Takeout files

Google Takeout exports Google Photos as the original files plus JSON sidecar files. Those sidecars hold the dates and descriptions Google stripped from the photos themselves. If you unzip the archives and upload the raw files directly, the dates are lost and a decade of photos gets dumped onto today's date.

The fix: use a tool that reads the sidecars. A community tool called immich-go reads Takeout archives, matches each photo to its sidecar, and uploads everything with the right dates. Read its README and do a test run with one archive first. Check that a handful of old photos land on the right day in the timeline before you feed it the rest.

Then the order of the exit matters:

  1. Import everything and compare counts between Google Photos and Immich.
  2. Run one full backup of your Immich library (on Proxmox, that means the Docker VM on your backup server, plus the off-site copy).
  3. Only then delete anything from Google.
  4. Cancel the subscription last.

Trap 2: a phone backup that silently stalls

The phone app is what replaces Google's automatic backup, and it only works if the phone lets it run. Install the Immich app from the App Store or Google Play, enter your server URL, log in with your normal account, and then:

  1. Open the backup settings and choose which albums to back up. "Recents" or "Camera" covers most phones.
  2. Turn on background backup.
  3. On Android, exclude the app from battery optimization in the system settings. On iPhone, leave Background App Refresh on for Immich.
  4. Leave the app open on Wi-Fi for the first big upload. Background uploads are throttled by the phone and will take days for a 50 GB library.

Even set up right, background backup on phones is best effort, because the operating system decides when apps may run. The habit that catches a stall: open the app once a week and glance at the backup count. It takes two seconds and it is the only way you'll notice.

There is a second, slower way backups stop: the version. Immich moved to v3 in July 2026, and the server only talks to mobile apps of a compatible major version. Pin the server in .env so a major upgrade never happens by surprise:

IMMICH_VERSION=v3

When you do update, update the phone apps first, then the server.

Trap 3: one login for the whole family

Sharing one account feels simpler, and it breaks the parts of Immich people actually like. Every phone backs up into the same library, and face recognition and memories mix everyone together.

The fix: give every person their own Immich account, so each phone backs up into its owner's library. Then use the two sharing tools Immich gives you:

  • Partner sharing, in each user's account settings, lets a spouse see your whole timeline, and optionally show it mixed into their own. This is the "our photos" feeling people miss from Google.
  • Shared albums work like Google's: add people by their Immich account, and everyone can add photos. For relatives without an account, a shared link works too, but only if that link is reachable from the internet. That is an exposure decision, not a default.

If the data disk is small, set a storage quota per user under Administration → Users. One 4K video habit can fill a terabyte faster than you'd expect.

Trap 4: the proxy that drops big videos

Photos upload fine through a reverse proxy; long phone videos are what fail. Behind Nginx Proxy Manager, two settings save hours of confusion. Turn on Websockets Support on the proxy host, and add this to the host's Advanced tab so large videos upload:

client_max_body_size 50000M;
proxy_request_buffering off;
proxy_read_timeout 600s;
proxy_send_timeout 600s;
send_timeout 600s;

One more rule from the Immich docs: Immich must be served at the root of its own subdomain, like photos.example.com, not under a path like example.com/photos. Putting it under a path fails in confusing ways.

Checklist

  • Storage template (year/month/day) switched on before the first upload
  • A normal account for daily use, separate from the admin
  • Takeout imported with immich-go after a one-archive test run, sidecar dates intact
  • Counts match, and one full backup of Immich done, before anything is deleted from Google
  • Phone background backup on; battery optimization off (Android) or Background App Refresh on (iPhone)
  • First big upload done with the app open on Wi-Fi
  • Backup count glanced at once a week
  • IMMICH_VERSION=v3 pinned; phone apps updated before the server
  • One Immich account per person; partner sharing and shared albums instead of a shared login
  • Per-user storage quotas if the disk is small
  • Websockets on and the large-upload settings in the proxy's Advanced tab
  • Immich on its own subdomain, never under a path

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