Migration Guide Amazon S3 Long-Term Archive
Google Takeout exports strip real dates and buries GPS in JSON files. Uploading directly to AWS S3 causes thousands of photos to appear as "taken today". FolioSort completely restores your EXIF metadata locally on your Mac before your migration.
S3 offers several storage tiers. For a personal photo archive, your main choices are two:
Export from takeout.google.com. Extract all zips. Run FolioSort's Takeout Import to restore real dates and GPS from JSON sidecars. Run the Mover with {YYYY}/{MM}/ to organize.
In the AWS Console, create a new S3 bucket. Choose a region close to you. Enable versioning if you want protection against accidental deletes. Keep "Block Public Access" on — this is a private archive.
Install the AWS CLI (brew install awscli), configure with aws configure, then sync your organized library to S3 with the command below.
S3 stores files as flat objects — but the key prefix acts as a folder path. A FolioSort-organized structure like photos/2023/07/IMG_4567.jpg makes browsing, lifecycle rules, and future retrieval infinitely easier than dumped Takeout chaos.
S3 stores a LastModified timestamp for each object. When FolioSort fixes your EXIF dates first, the file system dates are also corrected — so S3's object metadata reflects when photos were taken, not when you exported them.
Takeout duplicates photos in album folders. If 10,000 photos become 28,000 objects in S3, you're paying for 18,000 objects you shouldn't have. FolioSort removes duplicates before upload — saving real money.
S3 Standard gives 11 nines of durability. It's pointless archiving broken, misdated files for decades. FolioSort ensures what goes into S3 is correctly dated, GPS-restored, and deduplicated.
Prefer a browsable self-hosted gallery over S3 object storage? Immich runs on your own server with a Google Photos-like UI.
Want fast local access without cloud egress costs? A NAS archive is cheaper than S3 for anything you access regularly.
Archive to an external drive on your Mac first, then decide later whether to push to S3 or another destination.
FolioSort fixes your Takeout files before they reach S3. Correct dates, real GPS, no duplicates. One time — forever.