Suggestions for Synology Users

[brock]

Thanks for this script, this is super helpful. I'm running a Synology and thought I'd contribute a couple tips that others might find useful.

• The indexing service on Synology can't be stopped easily, and once you start this script, your Synology will likely come to a crawl as it attempts to index and generate thumbnails for all of the new photos. You can pause it in the menu bar at the top of the screen, but I'd recommend setting the Indexing Service to run on a schedule.

• If you try to run ./gpth-linux from SSH, it likely won't work because (I believe) it is expecting a typical linux window environment. What worked for me was to run this on another machine and select the folders over the Samba share, so mount the smb://synology, select photo or some other directory, then running ./gpth-macos

[brock]

Sponsoring you for the year @TheLastGimbus as a thank you!

[TheLastGimbus]

thought I'd contribute a couple tips

Nice of you! If you would want to, we could make some .md file/wiki page for you guys

once you start this script, your Synology will likely come to a crawl

Hmm, if you intend to leave them there, this shouldn't be an issue, because gpth copies each file, changes it's date and it's done - it doesn't modify them afterwards or anything. But yeah, you may want to stop this

... mount the smb://synology, ...

Umm... ;_;

Bro, you can just use cli options to skip whole desktop-enviroment-pickers stuff:

$ unzip takeout.zip
$ gpth --input takeout/ --output my-photos/
# Should work perfectly on any distro

Funny thing, gpth is recommended in offical synology faq 😅 https://kb.synology.com/en-in/DSM/tutorial/How_do_I_migrate_photos_from_Google_Photos although it's old python version

Sponsoring you

Big thanks! Will definietley enjoy some coding'n'pizza with this <3

[TheLastGimbus]

Maybe a separate Synology readme

I get you 👀 - i may add some extra notes soon

The readme says that you can just leave them as-is

Because of the amounts of emails where people just wouldn't read the readme, i dumbed it down to non-techy windoza users, and wish anyone advanced will see options with --help.

It says in options help that you need to extract them:

$ gpth --help
# ...
When ready, download all .zips, and extract them into *one* folder.
(Auto-extracting works only in interactive mode)

Then, run: gpth --input "folder/with/all/takeouts" --output "your/output/folder"
...and gpth will parse and organize all photos into one big chronological folder
# ...
-i, --input                   Input folder with *all* takeouts *extracted*. 
# ...

But yeah, kinda my fault, sorry for confusion 😅

[palijn]

regarding Synology indexing :
yes indeed, Synology Photos looks into the /photos shared folder and all the ~/Photos , and will react as soon as a file pops up in there.
That's why I feel it is best to extract and process files outside of these clearly identified folders, and mv the resulting folder into the appropriate one as the last step - which should protect the last modified time information on every file except maybe the root folder, and be extremely fast as long as you kept the folders within the same filesystem (because then no data will actually move at all). Choosing something akin to ~/Takeout and ~/Takeout-processed would normally do the job fine.
You were very right too, to mention that the Media Indexer will by default look for stuff into some specific folders, something most people would not even know.
Those two caveats should definitely be present in a Synology-specific readme.

Edit: I'm using ~ as the universal notation for "your home folder", usually in /home/username .

[brock]

Okay, it looks like I read that too fast and didn't pay close enough attention. I had downloaded the zips into one location, but not yet extracted them. Once I did that, all of the files are now in the Takeout folder.

The issue I'm running into now is that if I run ./gpth-linux --input Takeout --output google-photos it gives me this error:

Setting VM flags failed: Unrecognized flags: input

I explored this a bit yesterday and discovered that the script isn't recognized unless you elevate to the super user. You must instead run it as sudo ./gpth-linux --input Takeout --output google-photos

So it is running for the first time now.

[TheLastGimbus]

discovered that the script isn't recognized unless you elevate to the super user

Umm... aren't you missing chmod +x gpth-linux to give it execute permissions?

[brock]

I did give it executable permissions, but when run as the normal user, the dart script gave that output.

It looks like the permissions were off when I copied it over to the NAS. I ran a chmod 777 gpth-linux though a chmod 644 would probably have sufficed.

[vixius]

Hello, everyone. Thanks for your work. I do not understand many steps due to language and know how. I'm getting freak to fix this problem on my photo folder in synology. Is there some one that could explain me what to do step by step for running it?

[jaimetur]

Download Script:

OrganizeTakeoutPhotos_v1.1.2.zip

Instructions:

I have prepared the attached scripts pack that you can copy and unzip into any folder of our Synology NAS.

Once unzipped you have to paste the Takeout Zip files on the folder called 'Zip_files' which is the default folder or if you prefeer you can put them in any other subfolder and use the option --zip-folder <folder_name> to indicate it. (Note: paste all Zip files downloaded from Google Takeout directly on that folder, without subfolders inside it).

Then you just need to call from SSH terminal the master script 'OrganizeTakeoutPhotos.run' (ensure that it has execution permissons) and that's it.

Syntax:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OrganizeTakeoutPhotos v1.1.2 - 2024-11-22
Script (based on GPTH and EXIF Tools) to Process Google Takeout Photos (remove duplicates, fix metadata, organize per year/month folder, and separate Albums)
(c) by Jaime Tur (@jaimetur)

Usage: OrganizeTakeoutPhotos.run [Options]
Options:
  -z,  --zip-folder          Specify the Zip folder where the Zip files downloaded with Google Takeout are placed (default: Zip_files)
  -t,  --takeout-folder      Specify the Takeout folder where all the Zip files downloaded with Google Takeout will be unpacked (default: Takeout)
  -s,  --suffix              Specify the suffix for the output folder. Output folder will be Takeout folder followed by _{suffix}_{timestamp} (default: fixed)

  -sl, --skip-log            Flag to skip saving output messages into log file
  -su, --skip-unzip          Flag to skip unzip files (useful if you have already unzipped all the Takeout Zip files manually)
  -sg, --skip-gpth-tool      Flag to skip process files with GPTH Tool (not recommended since this tool do the main job)
  -se, --skip-exif-tool      Flag to skip process files with EXIF Tool
  -sm, --skip-move-albums    Flag to skip move all albums into Albums folder (not recommended)
  -fa, --flatten-albums      Flag to skip create year/month folder structuture on each album folder individually (recommended)
  -fn, --flatten-no-albums   Flag to skip create year/month folder structuture on ALL_PHOTOS folder (Photos without albums) (not recommended)

  -h , --help                Show this help message and exit
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Process Explained:

The whole process will do the next actions if all flags are false (by default):

1. Unzip all the Takeout Zips from default zip folder "Zip_files" (you can modify the Zip_folder with the option --zip-folder <folder_name>) into a subfolder named Takeout (by default) or any other folder if you specify it with the option --takeout-folder <folder_name>. This step can be skipped using flag --skip-unzip in case that you already have unzip all the files manually.

2. Use GPTH Tool to process all .json files and fix date of all photos/videos found on Takeout folder and organize them into the output folder using a year/month folder structure. There are two flags to avoid creating year/month folder structure on this step:

   • --flatten-albums to skip create year/month folder structuture on each album folder individually
   • --flatten-no-albums to skip create year/month folder structuture on ALL_PHOTOS folder (Photos without albums)

3. Then all the Albums will be moved into Albums subfolder and the Photos that does not belong to any album will be moved to ALL_PHOTOS folder. This step can be skipped using flag --skip-move-albums

4. Finally the script will use EXIF Tool as well just in case that any photo cannot be resolved by GPTH Tool. This step can be skipped using flag --skip-exif-tool

The result will be a folder (called Takeout_fixed_{timestamp} by default, but you can specify any other with the option --takeout-folder <folder_name> or change the default suffix 'fixed' by any other using the option --suffix <desired_suffix>) which will contains:

• ALL_PHOTOS subfolder with all the photos with year/month structure (by default).
• Albums subfolder with all the Albums without year/month structure (by default).

Finally you just need to move the output folder (Takeout_fixed_{timestamp} by default) into your /home/Photos folder and let Synology to index all files (it will take long time). After that you will be able to explore your photos chronologycally on the Synology Photos App, and all your Albums will be there when you explore the library by folder instead of chronologycally.

I hope this can be useful for any of you. It was very useful for me when I used it to retrieve more than 300 GB of Photos and Albums from Google Photos to move it into Synology Photos. The whole process took around 2.5 hours (extraction process around 1.5h while fixing and sorting process around 1h) to complete runing it directly on a Synology NAS DS920+ using SSH terminal.

Additional Trick!

When prepare Google Takeout to export all your Photos and Albums, select 50GB for the zip file size and select Google Drive as output for those Zip files. On this way you can just Download all the big Zip files directly on your Synology NAS by using the Tool Cloud Sync (included on Synology App Store) and creating a new synchronization task from your Google Drive account (/Takeout folder) to any local folder of your Synology NAS (I recommend to use the default folder called 'Zip_files' within this script folder structure)

Enjoy it!
Jaime Tur.
@jaimetur