Album not created if folder with album metadata has no assets (upload from-google-photos)

[cwacht]

First, I want to say thanks to everyone involved in making immich-go so a great tool. It really does a tremendous amount of heavy lifting getting photo libraries into Immich.

What I noticed

An album from Google Photos was missing from Immich. I checked my extracted Google Takeout files and found the metadata for that album was alone in the album folder. All assets were in other zips in folders with the album name but no album metadata.

A quick Test

To test my theory, I ran immich-go on a test folder with this structure:

• 📁 test
  • 📁 A
    • 📁 album_name
      • 📄 metadata.json [with the correct album_name]
  • 📁 B
    • 📁 album_name
      • 🖼️ asset_name.jpg
      • 📄 asset_name.jpg.suppl.json

The album did not get created.

Then I ran it again with this structure:

• 📁 test
  • 📁 album_name
    • 📄 metadata.json
    • 🖼️ asset_name.jpg
    • 📄 asset_name.jpg.suppl.json

The album did get created

My test used this command on immich-go v0.31.0:
./immich-go upload from-google-photos --log-file immich_upload.log --server=XXX --api-key=XXX --sync-albums --include-unmatched --client-timeout=180m --on-errors=continue test

In case this matters:

I initially ran immich-go on each individual 50GB zip. I noticed along the way that metadata was missing when assets and their sidecars were split up across zip files. So, after getting all my assets uploaded to Immich and my extracted takeout files backed up on an external drive, I re-ran immich-go on the entire collection which updated assets with their sidecars. However, that did not create the album whos metadata was separated from all of its assets.

Key point: I never ran immich-go on all the zip files together because I dont have enough space on my laptop for the full collection. Maybe immich-go handles zip files differently than extracted files, but I would expect it to connect assets to albums in both of my tests either way.

What I can do for now

After testing this, I'm confident that if I organize my extracted takeout files so that each album is a single directory with everything in it, then it will work as expected. It will take some time since I have many albums and my external drives take a long time to move files around (I think the mac makes it extra slow).