How I Migrated from Google Photos to iCloud Photos

TLDR First of all, check out if you have the official Google Photos to iCloud Photos option available in Google Takeout. If not, then try out google-photos-migrate for a simple way to merge your Takeout metadata files and the images. After years and years of Apple bugging me to upgrade to iCloud+, I finally jumped ship. The logical next step was to migrate from Google Photos to iCloud Photos. But let me tell you Maina, the process was not easy. I knew I would likely need to get my data from Google Takeout and so I did. The process was straightforward despite Google seemingly never updating that page. In all honesty, the UX could be improved, and finding that page in the first place is its own challenge. It honestly feels buried on purpose. Anyway, I downloaded my photos and that’s when I discovered every image file had a separate JSON file associated with it. Turns out the images didn’t have any metadata embedded in them and if I were to upload them as-is, all the images would show as…