… like me.

Last weekend I started the process of moving my photo storage from many scattered locations (OneDrive, Google Photos, Apple Photos) into one place of truth. In some ways this was less of a chore than it could have been. OneDrive makes getting photos off of the service much harder than it has to be. There is no transfer service, and no easy way to select several photos and download them into a usable format. Thankfully there weren’t many photos that were only on OneDrive, so all I really needed to do was get them off of Google Photos. Simple enough yeah?

Yeah, no.

The first hurdle came when I tried to use the Google Photos transfer tool. Helpfully Google provides a tool at all unlike Microsoft, however it doesn’t work if you have enabled Advanced Data Protection (totally reasonable). It makes sense, but it was an annoying roadblock. Google also provides a handy “takeout” service to package up data for you to download. Great! I’ll just download it myself and move everything into Apple Photos myself!

This is the point that cheapness got me. I am rocking a base-model M1 Mac Mini with 256 gb of storage. This has honestly been fine for me as almost everything I do lives in the cloud, I’ve always had 70-80 gb free in the machine and haven’t really needed to manage it much at all. Until last weekend.

Google broke apart my takeouts order into to pieces, one 50 gb and the other around 35 gb. That actually worked out great given my storage issues. The problem was, when I I downloaded the first takeout file onto my system, it was in the form of a zip file. In order to do anything with the file I had to unzip it, effectively using up 100 gb of storage which I didn’t have. I tried uninstalling apps and deleting unused data, but I just couldn’t clear the space I needed. This was quite the puzzle.

The solution I came up with was to download the zip file onto my phone into iCloud, unzip the file into my Mac (so the space used wasn’t eaten twice) and then drop all the photos into the Photos app. I had to do this for both takeout files… it was quite the process that took a couple of days of tinkering to make sure everything carried over. All because of 256 gb of storage. So don’t be like me, buy the next tier of storage up (or keep a large portable hard drive nearby and empty). ^1

^1 I had one of these storage drives but it wasn’t allowing me to write data to it… A problem to solve for another day 😬