Back up NAS photos to Google Photos using Pixel XL without explicitly copying files

I recently purchased a used Pixel XL to take advantage of the free unlimited Google Photos backup at the original quality. However, I faced a challenge when trying to back up a large collection of photos stored on my NAS. The simplest solution is apparently to copy all photos to the phone’s internal storage, let Google Photos back them up, and then delete them from the phone. However, this approach raises concerns about the longevity of the phone’s storage due to the large amount of data being written and deleted. (Though if you do the math, backing up a total 5TB of data will only cause about 10% wear of the eMMC. Still I would like to avoid unnecessary wear and tear.)

Warning: This method is slooooow if you have a large SMB share. Be patient.

This guide was inspired by a comment on a blog.

Prerequisites

A Pixel or Pixel XL device. You do not have to the original owner.
A NAS with SMB share enabled.
You are ok with rooting your Pixel device. This is the only way to mount network shares as internal storage, which is required for Google Photos to see and process the files.

Steps

1. Root your Pixel device

Root your Pixel device using Magisk. If you have ever rooted an Android device before, you must have heard of Magisk. (Hey, I still miss the days that it was more of an obligation to root Android devices.) Just follow the official Magisk installation guide. Not gonna lie, after a solid 6 years using non-rooted Android devices, I had to spend some time to get familiar with the process again. Many things did not change, but lots of stuff is not the same as before.

2. Install the rclone-mount module

After you have the device rooted, we need to install a Magisk module called rclone-mount. This module allows you to mount network shares using rclone, which supports SMB protocol. There is a fork of the repo called rclone-mount-magisk, which appears to be the top result if you google “magisk rclone mount”. DO NOT use that. Its bundled rclone binary is too old and does not support SMB mounts.

Now, here is the tricky part. The repo has been abandoned and archived for years and there were no tags for newer releases. I suppose it (as a part of the official Magisk module repo) was released through the module manager, but it was gone due to legal concerns.

Luckily, the og pixel has been abandoned by Google as well, so the archived codes still work fine. Here is how you can get a functional version of the module.

Get the repo (master branch) through a method you like. Note that if you use the “Download ZIP” button on GitHub, you will get a ZIP file that contains one more level of directory com.piyushgarg.rclone-master, which will need to get rid of.
Anyway, we have the folder now. You can choose to remove the readme and changelog files if you want, but all the rest are essential for the module.

Modify the installation script install.sh file to create an additional symlink and use latest rclone binary.

Replace the download links in the following block.

  if [ "$ARCH" == "arm" ];then
    ui_print "+ downloading rclone-$ARCH to $MODPATH/rclone"
    curl "https://beta.rclone.org/v1.72.0/testbuilds/rclone-android-16-armv7a.gz" | gunzip -d - > "$MODPATH"/rclone
  elif [ "$ARCH" == "arm64" ];then
    ui_print "+ downloading rclone-$ARCH to $MODPATH/rclone"
    curl "https://beta.rclone.org/v1.72.0/testbuilds/rclone-android-21-armv8a.gz" | gunzip -d - > "$MODPATH"/rclone
  elif [ "$ARCH" == "x86" ];then
    curl "https://beta.rclone.org/v1.72.0/testbuilds/rclone-android-16-x86.gz" | gunzip -d - > "$MODPATH"/rclone
  elif [ "$ARCH" == "x64" ];then
    curl "https://beta.rclone.org/v1.72.0/testbuilds/rclone-android-21-x64.gz" | gunzip -d - > "$MODPATH"/rclone
  fi

Replace https://beta.rclone.org/v1.72.0/testbuilds with https://beta.rclone.org/test/testbuilds-latest/{tarball_name}. You can only do this for arm64.

In the following block, we need to link fusermount to fusermount3 as well.

set_permissions() {
  # The following is the default rule, DO NOT remove
  set_perm_recursive $MODPATH 0 0 0755 0644
  set_perm $MODPATH/rclone 0 0 0755
  set_perm $MODPATH/fusermount 0 0 0755
  set_perm $MODPATH/fusermount-wrapper.sh 0 0 0755
  set_perm $MODPATH/service.sh 0 0 0755
  set_perm $MODPATH/rclonew 0 0 0755
  set_perm $MODPATH/syncd.sh 0 0 0755
  set_perm $MODPATH/inotifywait 0 0 0555

  ln -sf $MODPATH/rclone /sbin/rclone
  ln -sf $MODPATH/rclonew /sbin/rclonew
  ln -sf $MODPATH/fusermount /sbin/fusermount
        
  ...
}

Add the following line after the last ln -sf line.

  ln -sf $MODPATH/fusermount /sbin/fusermount3

This should allow us to mount the SMB share without issues.

Zip the folder to a ZIP file. Make sure the contents of the repo is directly in the root of the ZIP file, so the top level is directly install.sh, binary, etc.
Transfer the ZIP file to your Pixel device and install it through Magisk.

The file we need to create/modify is /sdcard/.rclone/rclone.conf. Here is my config file. You can create the file on the computer through rclone config

[DeepDarkFanta]
type = smb
host = deepdarkfantasy.lan
user = username
pass = password

The section DeepDarkFanta is the SMB share connection. DeepDarkFanta is the name of the connection, so you can name it whatever you want. Replace deepdarkfantasy.lan and username with your NAS’s IP address or hostname and username when running rclone config. rclone will also ask yor password and store it in the config file encrypted.

With this, rclone will mount all the SMB shares of you NAS to /mnt/cloud/connection_name. We do not want to mount everything as internal storage, so the next step is crucial. For example, all my photos are stored in the SMB share called photo. We will create an alias remote that only points to that share.

[ddf_photos]
type = alias
remote = DeepDarkFanta:photo

Now, rclone will mount only the photo share to /mnt/cloud/ddf_photos, alongside with everything under /mnt/cloud/DeepDarkFanta.

Till now, the mount will not be recognized as internal storage by Android. We need to add a configuration file to mount it as internal storage and tune the performance.

M_GID=1015
BINDSD=1
SDBINDPOINT=nas_photos
LOGLEVEL=NOTICE
DIRCACHETIME=1000h0m0s        
ATTRTIMEOUT=24h0m0s
BUFFERSIZE=36M
READCHUNKSIZE=256M
READAHEAD=4M
ADD_PARAMS="--read-only --transfers 8 --checkers 16"

M_GID=1015: This is the GID of the media_rw group on Pixel XL. This group has permission to read and write media files. You can check the GID on your device through ls -l /dev/block/platform/*/by-name/.
BINDSD=1 and SDBINDPOINT=nas_photos: This will mount the SMB share to /sdcard/nas_photos, which is required for Google Photos to see the files.
The rest are performance tuning options. You can tweak them as you like, but increasing DIRCACHETIME, BUFFERSIZE and READCHUNKSIZE should help with indexing the huge folders. Also, I mounted the share as read-only to prevent any accidental deletion of files. This should be an upload-only setup.

After all these, reboot your device. If everything goes well, you should see a new folder /sdcard/nas_photos that contains all your NAS photos. Give Google Photos sometime to realize this folder is an internal media folder and it will start to index and back up the photos automatically. The indexing process can take weeks (I have some dozens of thousands of photos and it is still going on after a full week of continuous processing), so be patient.

I found that disabling battery optimization for Google Photos and keeping the screen on while charging help speed up the process. However, the will get very hot doing so, so I used my spare Thermalright Phantom Spirit as a passive cooler, which is extremely effective. The cold plate does not even get warm.

Sometimes when things are really stuck, you can try to kill the app and restart.

Originally published on December 8, 2025.

Home Lab Self-hosted Photography NAS

Back up NAS photos to Google Photos using Pixel XL without explicitly copying files

Prerequisites

Steps

1. Root your Pixel device

2. Install the rclone-mount module

3. Configure and mount the SMB share