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guettli
Asked: 2015-09-22 09:09:19 +0800 CST

How to upload many images to Google Photo?

  • 772

I have 70k images in 2k directories on my Ubuntu PC.

I want to upload them to google photo to the unlimited store (called "high quality" with reduced size).

This solution looks too complicated to me.

Is there no simple way to get this done?

My images are stored in this structure:

Images/YYYY/MM/DD-a
Images/YYYY/MM/DD-b

Example:

Images/2001/01/01-a-new-year-fireworks
Images/2001/01/01-b-skiing-with-friends
...
Images/2015/09/30

PS: I know how to upload all files of a directory by hand (using the web GUI of google photos). But this does not work recursively. This means uploading by hand is not a solution for 70k photos.

PS2: I don't want to lose my directories. Putting all images of one day into on album would mean a massive loss of information for me. Look at the above example. There are two folders for the first of January. Both contain unrelated images.

google

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The answer to this question seems very trivial. All you have to do is open your file explorer (Nautilus) and open photos.google.com in your browser, and then drag the entire directory structure to the web page as given in the screen shot!

    screenshot

    Just drag and drop the "Images" folder. It is not a problem if the folder contains other files. Google will detect and upload only photos and videos. At the end of the upload, it will show a list of files which were not uploaded.

    • 31

  2. Uploading with Shotwell

    Use Picasa plugin

    It sounds weird since Picasa seems obsolete and a different service, but it looks like Google has joined this service with Photos so you can use it to upload photos there as a new collection. To enable this plugin:

    1. Choose Edit ▸ Preferences
    2. Click on the Plugins tab
    3. Make sure Picasa Web Albums is enabled and close the dialog

    Import the files

    1. Select the root folder of all of the images, lets Shotwell import them all
    2. Next, selects them all. For this you can click one and then press Ctrl+A
    3. Choose File ▸ Publish or press the Publish toolbar button or use Ctrl+P
    4. You will see a dialog that lets you select a publishing service. You will then need to log in or create an account.

    Screenshot:

    Shotwell screenshoot

    Create a new Album or choose an existing one, make sure the List album in public gallery checkbox is disabled and preferably set Original Size as the photo size preset. Then push Publish and done! You can see the pictures on Google Photos

    Excerpt from:

    • 20

  3. Go to Google Photos Web

    Select Upload

    In the UPLOAD FROM dialog box select Computer

    In File Upload Open the top level directory that contains the photos and videos - see note 3 below

    Now for the interesting part

    Select the search icon (Ensure you are searching at the right level, it is written in small letters just under the File Upload header

    And search for . that's space followed by full stop (or dot) to match all your images and videos

    Note: this works because the space matches everything similar to how many people would expect * to work and the dot will match the dot in the filename in for example my_image.jpg

    Next select all the files, for example click on the first one and then use Ctrl A, or use the mouse or whatever

    Finally select Open to upload all the files

    A few points just to mention...

    1. I'm using Ubuntu 18.04
    2. This worked for me in both Chrome and Firefox
    3. I wasn't quite brave enough to go to the very top level folder, I've been uploading one year of photos at a time which in one case was almost 5,000 photos, although in some cases there were three or four levels of nested directories.
    • 3

  4. By coincidence I found a way to upload a big db to Google Photos. Use fe Overgrive to sync the specific folder to Google Drive. You temporarily might have to pay for extra space in GD. Then turn on the option to show the pictures in GP from the GD (if you hadn't already). When all the pictures show in GP you can remove the folder from your GD and the pictures will still show in GP (though in my case not original quality, but I didn't want that anyway). And cancel the extra space in the cloud.

    PS. For using a network folder. Maybe it is possible to create a local folder of the network in the GD folder of Overgrive. But saw some worries on this topic. Didn't try it yet.

    PS2. Overgrive is/was planning to create a solution for syncing pictures to GP. Don't know the status of that to be clear.

    PS3. After uploading the database I expect to use auto upload from the devices themselves. But if the database has evolved, the new folders can maybe also be uploaded the same way as mentioned in the beginning.

    PS4. Also noticed Insync software which should also work in Ubuntu. Haven't tried that one yet.

    • 1

  5. EDIT

    Unfortunately this doesn't work. I don't know whether it never worked and I just missed to notice or it stopped working at some point. Currently the following solution will only upload files to Google Drive and these won't be available in Google Photos and will take up your space (unlike files from Google Photos that have 0kB size when High quality setting is on). I'm not deleting the answer because maybe someone will figure this out and improve it.

    Original answer

    Just another way of doing things:

    1. set Google Photos (in Drive settings) to appear in Google Drive
    2. mount Google Drive (e.g. add your Google account to GNOME Online Accounts in system settings and open google-drive://[email protected]/Google Photos in your file manager)
    3. copy photos structured by YYYY > MM > DD > file, e.g.:
    + 2016
|
 `+ 08
  |
  |`+ 20
  | |
  | |`- myawesomepic.jpg
  |  `- DSC20160820066.PNG
  |
   `+ 23
    |
     `- vid016.mp4
    1. you can download and / or remove photos in the same way
    • 0