Google Photos migrate didn't import albums, either instructions are unclear or desktop app bug

[cpeel]

Description

The migration docs from Google Photos says:

While the app supports uploading multiple ZIPs too, we recommend unzipping them all into a single folder and uploading that folder instead so that your photo dates are imported properly (details).

So I downloaded the 15x 2GB zip files from Google Takeouts as-instructed. I copied them all into a single directory on my macOS and I extracted them which produced 15 directories:

cpeel@Javier:~/Downloads/Google Photos Takeout$ ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x@ 4 cpeel  staff  128 Sep 23 17:40 Takeout
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:03 Takeout 10
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:03 Takeout 11
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:03 Takeout 12
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:04 Takeout 13
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:04 Takeout 14
drwxr-xr-x@ 4 cpeel  staff  128 Sep 23 11:04 Takeout 15
drwxr-xr-x@ 4 cpeel  staff  128 Sep 24 16:43 Takeout 2
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:01 Takeout 3
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:02 Takeout 4
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:02 Takeout 5
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:02 Takeout 6
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:02 Takeout 7
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:02 Takeout 8
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 cpeel  staff   96 Sep 23 11:03 Takeout 9

Each of those have a single Google Photos directory in them.

Then I pointed Ente at the ~/Downloads/Google Photos Takeout directory, per the instructions.

The photos imported fine with what appear to be accurate timestamps (yay!) but none of the albums came through.

I suspect either:

1. The instructions intended for all of the zip files to be extracted over each other so there is one top-level Google Photos directory and to point Ente at that directory. If that's the case, the instructions need to be much clearer and also tell people how to do this because it's not clear to me on macOS although I can probably massage an unzip command to do that (maybe). There were duplicate folder names in several of the Google Photos subdirectories so it's not just a simple matter of moving the the directories after extraction.
2. This is actually suppose to work as-is and the albums just weren't imported for some reason.

Version

1.7.14

What product are you using?

Ente Photos

What platform are you using?

Desktop - macOS

[s38b35M5]

There is an option to download a single file with Google takeout. I did that when I switched in December '23, as that seemed to be the way the app preferred to handle imports. I believe (it's been a while) you have to change the file format from zip to tarball/gz to show the additional optional file sizes.