Best way to clean up & unify years of photo chaos across HDDs, Nextcloud, Google Photos?
Hi, I'm looking for some advice on how to deal with years of fragmented photo hoard. right now my stuff is scattered everywhere and I really wanna get my shit together. My situation: I got pics from all over the place (camera photos, whatsapp media,…
Hi, I'm looking for some advice on how to deal with years of fragmented photo hoard. right now my stuff is scattered everywhere and I really wanna get my shit together. My situation: I got pics from all over the place (camera photos, whatsapp media, screenshots, stored snaps, shared folders from friend). They are spread across an external HDD, my macbook, hetzner nextcloud and google photos. I use a mac and an android phone. What I'm looking for: one central place for everything automated cleanup / deduplication (there are so many dupes and whatsapp resizes). I think intial clean up would a lot already smart features like face recognition / people search auto backup from my android phone whenever I take new pics (synced then once I'm entering a WiFi proper backup strategy so i don't lose anything I'm open to anything tech-wise, whether its selfhosted docker stuff (like immich or photoprism on my hetzner server) or some paid cloud service (ente, google photos etc). Questions for you: What tool would you use on Mac to dedupe before uploading everything? What photo platform do you recommend for the cloud? Thanks in advance!
Collected discussion
For automated clean-up and deduplication, I wrote a tool called GroupMachine to do this. It can be run as a one-off activity or integrated into an automated workflow. It'll take photos and videos from multiple folders (and sources) and then combine them into structured albums/folders based on time and location changes. If you download a free GeoNames database, then it'll rename the albums/folders into something meaningful (e.g. "Le Marais, Montmartre and Latin Quarter" instead of just "4 Apr 2025 - 7 Apr 2025"). In my use-case, I download photos and videos taken from multiple phones and cameras and then use GroupMachine to create albums based on family events containing all the relevant content (irrespective of who took it). For photo management, most people use Immich. Once GroupMachine has sorted out your content, you can use Immich Folder Album Creator to get the structured folders into Immich.
Since you already have a Hetzner server, you are in a perfect spot to get this sorted. First, pull everything down to your external drive and run Czkawka on your Mac to wipe out duplicates and compressed WhatsApp resizes. For the platform, spin up Immich on your server. It is an amazing self-hosted Google Photos clone with a great Android app for auto-backups and local face recognition. Since Immich just handles the management, remember to back up your Docker volumes offsite using BorgBackup or Restic, and sync your library back to your external drive occasionally. If you ever get tired of self-hosting, Ente is the best paid cloud alternative right now.
Keep originals untouched and do cleanup on copies. For shared/exported photos, stripping location and device metadata is worth adding to the workflow.