Migrate from Google Photos to self-hosted: the complete 2026 guide

You have decided to leave Google Photos. Here is the whole path, from nothing set up to Google Photos deleted with your library intact. Active time is about an hour, plus an overnight wait while Google builds the export. Still deciding? Read why Noodle Gallery beats Google Photos →

What you'll need before you start

• A machine to run Noodle Gallery on (NAS, mini PC, Raspberry Pi 5, old desktop, or a small VPS)
• Roughly twice your library size in free disk space (one copy of the originals, room for thumbnails and ML data)
• About an hour of attention, split across two sessions, plus the wait for Google's export
• Access to your Google account at takeout.google.com

Step 1: set up Noodle Gallery

Install Gallery first, so it is ready for your photos when the export arrives. About five minutes if Docker is already on your server.

1. Follow the installation guide to get Gallery running with Docker Compose.
2. Open the web UI at http://your-server:2283 and create the first admin account.
3. Make a note of the URL. You come back to it in Step 4.

Skip the mobile app for now. The migration happens in the browser. The app is for what comes after Google Photos is gone: daily backup of new photos from your phone.

Step 2: request a Google Takeout export

Google Takeout is Google's own tool for pulling your data out of Google products. It gives you a complete copy of everything you uploaded to Google Photos, with the metadata that came with it.

1. Go to takeout.google.com while signed in.
2. Click Deselect all, then scroll down and tick Google Photos.
3. Click All photo albums included to pick specific albums. Leave it as-is to export everything.
4. Click Next step.
5. For "Delivery method" choose Send download link via email.
6. For "Frequency" choose Export once.
7. For "File type & size" leave the file type as .zip. On a large library, bump the file size up to 50 GB: fewer parts to download.
8. Click Create export.

Google starts preparing the export right away. Close the page if you like: it all happens server-side.

Step 3: wait for the export email

This is the part nobody warns you about. Google's export queue is unpredictable: a 5 GB library might be ready in 20 minutes, while a 200 GB library can take over a day. No progress indicator, and no way to hurry it.

When the export is ready, Google emails you the download links. They expire after seven days. Download everything as soon as you can, straight onto the server you will import from, so you do not copy the data twice.

If Google splits a large library into parts, one email carries all the links. Download every one.

Step 4: import via the in-browser wizard

With the Takeout zips downloaded and Gallery running, the import is the easy part.

1. Open Noodle Gallery in your browser and sign in.
2. Open the side menu and click Import → Google Photos.
3. Drag your Takeout .zip files into the import wizard. You can drop several at once if Google split your export into parts.
4. Click Start import.

The wizard reads each zip in place, so nothing is unpacked to disk first. Photos go into Gallery's library, the metadata sidecars get parsed, dates and GPS coordinates are reattached, favourites stay favourites, and Google's album structure is recreated as Gallery albums.

The edge cases (deleted photos, archived photos, "shared with me" content) are covered on the feature page. See how the import wizard works in detail →

Step 5: verify your library

Do not skip this step. Ten minutes of checking now saves a lot of heartbreak later.

• Check the photo count. Compare Gallery's library size with what Google Photos showed. They should be close. A gap under 1% usually means Google deduplicated images that Gallery kept separate.
• Check a few dates. Open photos from different years and see whether the timestamps look right. On older photos, Google Takeout sometimes writes the import date instead of the capture date. Gallery falls back to the EXIF data when it spots that, but check a handful anyway.
• Check GPS. Open the map view and confirm photos land in the right places. A cluster of "null island" pins (latitude 0, longitude 0) means some metadata did not transfer cleanly. Run the import again with the JSON sidecar handling enabled.
• Run face recognition. Google computes its face groupings server-side, so they do not transfer. Start Gallery's face detection job from Settings → Jobs → Face Detection → Run on All. When it finishes, name a few people. Gallery recognises them across the rest of your library.
• Check albums. Open the Albums view and confirm your Google albums are there with the right photos in them.
• Check favourites. Filter by Favourites and confirm the photos you starred in Google Photos are still marked.

Ten minutes of verification. Skipping it can cost you years of memories.

Step 6: delete from Google Photos

Do this once Step 5 looks good and you have run Gallery for a few days without missing anything. No rush. Google Photos keeps your library indefinitely, so a week of sanity-checking costs you nothing.

When you're ready:

1. Go to photos.google.com.
2. Use bulk select (click the first photo, scroll to the bottom of your library, shift-click the last photo) and delete in batches.
3. Empty the Trash to actually free up the storage.
4. Done with Google entirely? You can close the account at myaccount.google.com. Read Google's warnings first: this also deletes Gmail, Drive and YouTube.

Cancelling a Google One subscription is a separate step, inside the Google One settings. The storage subscription does not auto-cancel when you delete the photos.

Common pitfalls

Library too large for one export request

Google's largest export file size is 50 GB. Bigger libraries get split into numbered parts automatically (takeout-001.zip,takeout-002.zip, and so on). Drop them all into the wizard at once. At the wizard's end there is no library size limit.

Metadata in JSON sidecars instead of EXIF

Google Takeout often stores per-photo metadata in a separate JSON file next to the image instead of writing it back into EXIF. The wizard reads those sidecars and reattaches the metadata at import time, so there is nothing for you to do. If you have ever unpacked a Takeout by hand and wondered why the dates were missing, this is why.

Live Photos and Motion Photos

Takeout splits Apple Live Photos and Google Pixel Motion Photos into a JPEG plus a short MP4 with a matching filename. The wizard pairs them back up, and your library shows them as live previews on iOS and Android, the way Google Photos did.

Year-dated subfolder structure

Inside the Takeout zip, photos sit in folders likePhotos from 2024/ and Photos from 2023/. The wizard ignores the folder structure and places each photo on the timeline from its own metadata.

"Shared with me" photos

Photos other people shared with you in Google Photos are not included in your Takeout. To keep them, add them to your own library before you request the export, or ask whoever shared them to send them to you directly.

Frequently asked questions