[HELP] Organize and view downloaded photos

[prigal]

Hello all,

This is not really an issue, more like a discussion/forum.

Thanks to this project, @msfjarvis fork and this article https://msfjarvis.dev/posts/backing-up-your-content-from-google-photos/ I manage to make everything work to start backuping my google photos (I now need to setup a nas with 2TB to start downloading everything !)

This is the list of file I'm getting when using this project :

Is there any solution to have them ordered by year and month for example or it's not a good idea and I should use a tool to preview them instead of wanting to have them sorted on my filesystem ? I found projects like photoprism or photostructure, what is your solution ?

Thank you !

[msfjarvis]

I would not recommend sorting it on disk because gphotos-cdp makes assumptions about where it'll download stuff to and moving them around breaks that, and may result in lots of duplicate downloads. A separate tool to index and organize them is the better choice.

[prigal]

Hello @msfjarvis, thanks for your answer, I will use a separate tool. (I was thinking of building a year/month/day library in a separate folder and placing symlinks to the real file in them, but I think you're right, the best option is to use a separate tool for browsing.

About the backup, it is still running : ~150GB over ~2TB library, it will take time with my DSL, I understand that. But how can I be confident in the fact that everything has been downloaded. Do you have any tips for this ?

I found this kind of feature in an other fork : https://github.com/nirajsanghvi/gphotos-cdp/pull/1/files to try to re-run the whole script to add missing files without downloading again the whole library. Maybe it's a good approach to have 2 crons :

1. daily : the first one that run the command to download new stuff
2. weekly : the second one that only run with skipexisting flag

How do you handle this on your side ?

[msfjarvis]

I have the job running under healthchecks-monitor with failure logs enabled so I know when it fails and I can manually rewind it to the last successful one and continue from there. My Photos library is fairly small coming in at around 6-7 gigabytes so I was able to rather easily babysit the first sync and then incremental updates have been running automatically since.

Given that you have a significantly larger library it's sensible to go with the approach you've come up with.

[prigal]

My Photos library is fairly small coming in at around 6-7 gigabytes

Ok, I have a new problem but maybe you didn't experienced it with a smaller library #41