https://takeout.google.com/

Export your photos with take out

Then use immich-go to import

https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

I didn't see it mentioned here, but rclone has a Google Photos backend, that will allow you to pull everything.

*sift

For the step 2 you could use the face recognition baked into Immich to find and maybe delete/hide the photos

for whatsapp I think the files are prefixed with "wa" or something and actually you could check the default filename formatting of real pictures and filter out all others (to put in a different location)

from this you could also check the size/ratio: pictures you took are usually not scared shaped, and definitely not in a gif format

filtering those out might already reduce the manual work

(for the last thing, IMO those photos are still part of your life, maybe put them aside but don't delete things you could regret later, but that's really up to you and your feelings)

i did the google take out and then just a regular drag and drop, everything went fine but all my screenshots had no dates in the metadata by the looks so it put them all on a single date which caused immich to stop loading properly

just once it did I went through and deleted all my old screenshots and now it's all good again :)

no really, no. because what you want to keep is subjective. like @Cerothen@lemmy.ca said, which is what i did, you just dump and import. but any curating is a manual effort.

seeing this question raised and looking for a google-to-immich migrator utility in the comments

Use xnview which is open source to detect and remove duplicates before importing in Immich. Immich can also detect duplicates but it would to have to create lots of thumbnails for nothing.

If a picture don’t trigger an emotion or you’re not on it, think that you could get it from internet in better quality.

Cleaning is important and will help to keep backup tidy.

I don’t like personally to import in Immich, I use external library. Yes a pain in the ass to make folders but if Immich disappear, I won’t be locked in there.

I'm interested in the same question but more broadly: currently everything gets automatically backed up to Google, or mindlessly shared to Google. I see that Immich supports backing up folders, but I'm worried about missing an app and not backing stuff up or something like that.

I just put it on my nas then used the external library feature in immich