I went through this process last month, and I'm sorry to say that this article hardly even skims the surface about how
painful this process actually is. Here's why:
- If you have a lot of photos, Google Takeout will export them as 2GB zip files, which you have to download one by one. I had around 130 to download, which took ages. Also, your Google Takeout export only remains available for around 2 weeks before it's deleted, so you're against the clock to do the below.
- When downloading these files, you better have a MacBook that has enough storage. I have a MBP with 256GB which I ended up completely resetting so that I could have enough space to download the files.
- The killer bit of all this: when you upload the photos through Apple's Photos app, Photos essentially makes a copy of them in its Library file. This very quickly takes up any leftover space on the MacBook, at which point Photos refuses to upload them to iCloud, citing lack of storage space. I ended up having to follow some steps to create a separate partition of my hard drive with a limited amount of space, and move my Photos Library file into there. That way, Apple Photos would pick up sooner that the drive was full, and delete uploaded files from the local drive.
- If you're transitioning from an Android phone, there's extra, pretty awful news; iCloud distinguishes the date of your photos by a certain EXIF date ("DateTimeOriginal"), but Android does it by the photo's "File Created" date. This has the side effect of meaning that the Photos app thinks all of your photos were taken on the same day (i.e. the day you downloaded them), because it couldn't find a date stamp. This meant I had to buy a separate Mac app, which would go through my photos and copy the Date Created field to the relevant EXIF fields.
So just to be clear:
- Download a couple of zip files from Google Photos
- Unzip them and run them through a tool that will change the date stamps as above
- Import to Photos app, wait for them to upload
- Delete zip and unzipped files.
- Repeat 1-4
Hopefully you can see now, this is not an easy process, and took me at least a week. It's really frustrating when you consider that
there's a tool for moving your iCloud photos to Google Photos in the cloud, but not the reverse.