Getting off Google Photos

Migrated the entire photo library off Google Photos and onto Immich, a self-hosted photo/video library, running on the cluster. The import itself was the easy part — immich-go walked the Google Takeout export and uploaded everything, preserving albums and original timestamps, and just needed time to grind through the whole library.

The part actually worth writing up: verifying hardware video transcoding was really being used, not just configured. One of the machines in the cluster has an Intel GPU passed through for exactly this — video libraries mean constant transcoding for playback on whatever device is asking, and doing that in software instead of on the GPU is the difference between a responsive library and a fan-noise problem. Checked the running configuration directly rather than trusting the settings panel’s word for it, and confirmed hardware-accelerated decode was active. Good to actually verify rather than assume — a setting that looks correct in a UI and a setting that’s actually in effect are two different claims.