Suggestions for Synology Users

[brock]

Thanks for this script, this is super helpful. I'm running a Synology and thought I'd contribute a couple tips that others might find useful.

• The indexing service on Synology can't be stopped easily, and once you start this script, your Synology will likely come to a crawl as it attempts to index and generate thumbnails for all of the new photos. You can pause it in the menu bar at the top of the screen, but I'd recommend setting the Indexing Service to run on a schedule.

• If you try to run ./gpth-linux from SSH, it likely won't work because (I believe) it is expecting a typical linux window environment. What worked for me was to run this on another machine and select the folders over the Samba share, so mount the smb://synology, select photo or some other directory, then running ./gpth-macos

[brock]

Sponsoring you for the year @TheLastGimbus as a thank you!

[TheLastGimbus]

thought I'd contribute a couple tips

Nice of you! If you would want to, we could make some .md file/wiki page for you guys

once you start this script, your Synology will likely come to a crawl

Hmm, if you intend to leave them there, this shouldn't be an issue, because gpth copies each file, changes it's date and it's done - it doesn't modify them afterwards or anything. But yeah, you may want to stop this

... mount the smb://synology, ...

Umm... ;_;

Bro, you can just use cli options to skip whole desktop-enviroment-pickers stuff:

$ unzip takeout.zip
$ gpth --input takeout/ --output my-photos/
# Should work perfectly on any distro

Funny thing, gpth is recommended in offical synology faq 😅 https://kb.synology.com/en-in/DSM/tutorial/How_do_I_migrate_photos_from_Google_Photos although it's old python version

Sponsoring you

Big thanks! Will definietley enjoy some coding'n'pizza with this <3

[TheLastGimbus]

Maybe a separate Synology readme

I get you 👀 - i may add some extra notes soon

The readme says that you can just leave them as-is

Because of the amounts of emails where people just wouldn't read the readme, i dumbed it down to non-techy windoza users, and wish anyone advanced will see options with --help.

It says in options help that you need to extract them:

$ gpth --help
# ...
When ready, download all .zips, and extract them into *one* folder.
(Auto-extracting works only in interactive mode)

Then, run: gpth --input "folder/with/all/takeouts" --output "your/output/folder"
...and gpth will parse and organize all photos into one big chronological folder
# ...
-i, --input                   Input folder with *all* takeouts *extracted*. 
# ...

But yeah, kinda my fault, sorry for confusion 😅

[palijn]

regarding Synology indexing :
yes indeed, Synology Photos looks into the /photos shared folder and all the ~/Photos , and will react as soon as a file pops up in there.
That's why I feel it is best to extract and process files outside of these clearly identified folders, and mv the resulting folder into the appropriate one as the last step - which should protect the last modified time information on every file except maybe the root folder, and be extremely fast as long as you kept the folders within the same filesystem (because then no data will actually move at all). Choosing something akin to ~/Takeout and ~/Takeout-processed would normally do the job fine.
You were very right too, to mention that the Media Indexer will by default look for stuff into some specific folders, something most people would not even know.
Those two caveats should definitely be present in a Synology-specific readme.

Edit: I'm using ~ as the universal notation for "your home folder", usually in /home/username .

[brock]

Okay, it looks like I read that too fast and didn't pay close enough attention. I had downloaded the zips into one location, but not yet extracted them. Once I did that, all of the files are now in the Takeout folder.

The issue I'm running into now is that if I run ./gpth-linux --input Takeout --output google-photos it gives me this error:

Setting VM flags failed: Unrecognized flags: input

I explored this a bit yesterday and discovered that the script isn't recognized unless you elevate to the super user. You must instead run it as sudo ./gpth-linux --input Takeout --output google-photos

So it is running for the first time now.

[TheLastGimbus]

discovered that the script isn't recognized unless you elevate to the super user

Umm... aren't you missing chmod +x gpth-linux to give it execute permissions?

[brock]

I did give it executable permissions, but when run as the normal user, the dart script gave that output.

It looks like the permissions were off when I copied it over to the NAS. I ran a chmod 777 gpth-linux though a chmod 644 would probably have sufficed.