Migration Guide Self-Hosted macOS
Google Takeout exports strip real dates and buries GPS in JSON files. Uploading directly to Immich causes thousands of photos to appear as "taken today". FolioSort completely restores your EXIF metadata locally on your Mac before your migration.
Immich is an open-source, self-hosted photo and video backup solution that looks and feels like Google Photos — without the privacy trade-offs.
Your photos stay on your hardware — a home server, a NAS, or a VPS. No Google scanning your images. No AI training on your memories.
Immich has a mobile app and web UI that feel familiar. Timeline view, albums, search by face and location — without the subscription.
Google Photos gives you 15 GB free, then charges monthly. Immich is limited only by your hard drives. A 4 TB drive costs under €80.
Immich is actively developed and free to use. No vendor lock-in. You own your data format and your server.
Before you can upload to Immich, you need to fix the fundamental problem with Google Takeout exports.
Go to takeout.google.com and request a Google Photos export. Download all zip files when ready. Most libraries take 1–3 days to prepare.
Extract the zips and run FolioSort's Takeout Import. It reads every .json sidecar, restores real timestamps and GPS coordinates into EXIF, and resolves duplicates. This is the critical step most guides skip.
Run the Mover with {YYYY}/{MM} {Month}/. Every photo lands in the correct year and month based on actual EXIF date — ready for Immich to ingest with perfect timeline order.
Use Immich's built-in uploader, the mobile app, or the immich-go CLI tool to upload your organized, properly-dated library. Immich preserves your EXIF dates for it its timeline.
Once FolioSort has fixed your metadata, you have several options for getting files into Immich.
Most Immich migration guides skip the metadata problem. FolioSort solves it.
If you upload Takeout files without fixing them first, your Immich timeline will show everything as "today." FolioSort fixes that permanently by writing real dates into EXIF before upload.
Immich's "Explore by location" feature works only if photos have GPS in EXIF. FolioSort restores GPS from Takeout's JSON sidecars so your Immich map view is populated.
Google Takeout duplicates photos across album folders. Without deduplication, Immich shows the same memory multiple times. FolioSort handles this before upload.
Whether you move files to a NAS or an external drive for Immich ingestion, FolioSort verifies every file with a checksum. Zero corrupted images arrive in your Immich server.
The full deep-dive: what Takeout breaks, how JSON sidecars work, and the complete FolioSort workflow. Start here if you haven't already.
Running Immich on a Synology? This guide covers moving your organized library directly to your Synology via SMB with FolioSort.
Prefer Nextcloud over Immich? Same process — FolioSort fixes your Takeout files and you upload to Nextcloud's Photos app.
FolioSort handles the hard part — fixing dates, recovering GPS, removing duplicates — so Immich gets a perfect library to work with.