3x Smaller: Centralizing and Cleaning 194 GB of Photos with an LLM
After years of accumulating photos and videos across both iCloud and Google Photos, I decided to self-host everything on Immich - an excellent open-source Google Photos alternative that I’m self-hosting (deployment manifests). Setting up Immich itself was straightforward. The real challenge was how badly organized my pictures were: some were on iCloud, some on Google Photos, some on random SD cards, some on Drive folders, some were pictures missing proper EXIF metadata, some were embedding a live video, some file names had collisions, some videos had poor encoding and were huge, some were duplicated, some … This is the story of how I used an LLM assistant throughout that process - mostly Claude Code, and later also OpenCode with GLM-5.2. ...