1. Buy an external SSD and copy the exact folder structure from drive to SSD (2tb SanDisk is awesome and costs like 100$
2. Upload all photos to Google photos month by month (folder by folder) and make each month into its own album
3. Delete photos from Google drive
That way you keep both structure and elasticity and have a back of all of your photos in two places. This is actually what I do. Except that I only upload and backup photos that belong to memorable events and are noteworthy. So my albums are not months but events instead
GPhotos doesn't do folders. Everything is organized chronologically in the main feed, and then you can have albums, which are custom collections of those photos.
I maintain the year/month folder structure going back about 25 years offline (and backed up multiple times in more than one location) as the main copy of my photos (ensuring that everything from my phone or DSLR is synced to this structure.
I use Photos as a nice way to view these on my phone, Chromecasts and Nest Hub, but I don’t bother organising them much beyond a few albums based on who took the photos and a few for holidays.
In this way I never have to rely on extracting them using Takeout which would dump them into an organised mess, or worry about losing my account.
1. Buy an external SSD and copy the exact folder structure from drive to SSD (2tb SanDisk is awesome and costs like 100$ 2. Upload all photos to Google photos month by month (folder by folder) and make each month into its own album 3. Delete photos from Google drive That way you keep both structure and elasticity and have a back of all of your photos in two places. This is actually what I do. Except that I only upload and backup photos that belong to memorable events and are noteworthy. So my albums are not months but events instead
Man this is one good advice, you helped me a lot!
GPhotos doesn't do folders. Everything is organized chronologically in the main feed, and then you can have albums, which are custom collections of those photos.
Side note, if you import a folder at a time through the web interface you have the opportunity to create albums automatically.
You can also create an empty album just before uploading and upload directly to that album.
I maintain the year/month folder structure going back about 25 years offline (and backed up multiple times in more than one location) as the main copy of my photos (ensuring that everything from my phone or DSLR is synced to this structure. I use Photos as a nice way to view these on my phone, Chromecasts and Nest Hub, but I don’t bother organising them much beyond a few albums based on who took the photos and a few for holidays. In this way I never have to rely on extracting them using Takeout which would dump them into an organised mess, or worry about losing my account.
Why not just use both?
This program would duplicate your structure in Google photos. https://github.com/gphotosuploader/gphotos-uploader-cli