Google-drive – How to upload existing albums to new (2015) Google Photos

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Background

I have 300GBs of neatly organized photographs of my past 10 years in 500+ folders (albums) with names like:

20150320-20150320 Partial Solar Eclipse (Szentes, Dónáti domb) [Sarah]
20150330-20150331 Siófok-Tihany (Balaton) [Mom, Sarah]

Each of these folders contain 10-1000 x 1-4MB JPEG files taken via several cameras and phones.

Question

While I like the idea of just dumping everything at Google Photos and it will organize them by date, I would like to still keep my Albums intact, especially since I may have 2-3 albums for different events on a single day sometimes. I can make piece of losing some quality with the "High quality (free unlimited storage)" option, but I don't want to re-do all my organizing of re-picking each event's photos into albums in the browser if I have it already.

I'm looking for any options that might preserve the existing folder structure (instead of Photos' yyyy/mm/dd/*.jpg) or create albums on the UI for each folder.
A nice to have feature would be to also upload an occasional .txt file that's in the album too.

Without these features I would lose months of organization work and I will have the inability to ever re-create the current structure I have.

I tried the following options already

  1. Upload to Google Drive as folders and move to Google Photos folder, this counts against Drive quota, which is not unlimited
  2. Upload via Google Photos uploader, images are scattered into yyyy/mm folders merging a lot of events into one folder AND NOT creating any albums in the meantime at https://photos.google.com/collections
  3. Searched for new Google Photos API to write my own "albumizer", but none found 🙁

Best Answer

If you upload using the Google Photos uploader, albums won't get automatically created, but the folder name will get saved with the photo metadata.

Try this: after uploading your photos from multiple folders, do a search to one of the folder names ("solar eclipse" in your case). This will list all your photos uploaded from that folder. Now - for the moment - you can put up with this funcitonality (always accessing your albums by a search).

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