Upload of old Google Takeout zip fails — json files are unsupported, all files are without a sidecar

[TedTed]

I have an old (2017) Google Takeout archive that I was hoping to upload to Immich. I used the default options:

immich-go upload from-google-photos --server <my-url> --api-key=<my-api-key> takeout-20170922T080037Z-001.zip

Sadly, probably because the metadata format changed a bunch since then, immich-go doesn't seem to recognize the json files and doesn't upload anything:

Full log file: immich-go_2025-10-09_23-26-29.log

It's probably too much to ask to support old Takeout archives (though it certainly would be great), but if I knew what JSON format immich-go expected, I could probably write a script to convert all those JSON files into the right format? Is it documented somewhere? Here's a random JSON file from the archive (with lat/long truncated for privacy) to give an idea of what it looks like:

{
  "tags": [],
  "description": "",
  "title": "IMG_20160612_112853.jpg",
  "people": [],
  "comments": [],
  "url": "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-m5IqGWUEJVs/V13gqQQYvqI/AAAAAAAAEC0/hyHKe8NUhPsf7cDd25Oi6BaGXseVF0migCLAB/s0-d/IMG_20160612_112853.jpg",
  "geoInfo": {
    "latitude_": 48.8,
    "longitude_": 2.3,
    "altitude_": -0.0,
    "latitude_span_": 0.0,
    "longitude_span_": 0.0,
    "uninterpreted": null,
    "optional_0_": 7,
    "isMutable": true,
    "cachedSize": -1
  },
  "geoInfoExif": {
    "latitude_": 48.8
    "longitude_": 2.3
    "altitude_": -0.0,
    "latitude_span_": 0.0,
    "longitude_span_": 0.0,
    "uninterpreted": null,
    "optional_0_": 7,
    "isMutable": true,
    "cachedSize": -1
  },
  "imageViews": 0,
  "license": null
}

Thanks a ton in advance! And thanks for your work on this project!

[simulot]

Indeed, the JSON structure has changed since then. I can certainly adjust immich-go to read the old format.

You should also check your archives to see if there are variation of those files.