I have a private Gitlab repository that I want to make public, but some of the people who have worked on it don’t want their names/Gitlab accounts to be visible there. I wanted to scrub their names, then, and I heard about git filter-repo as the “state of the art” for doing it, so to speak.

As I understood it, I have to update my local copy and then push it to a new repo, so that any comments/merge requests/etc they made to the Gitlab project (as opposed to just the repo’s commit history itself) would also be gone. However, I’m using git LFS—the project contains a number of image files, Photoshop files, etc—and I have enough of them stored that they go beyond the free storage available on Gitlab and I needed to buy extra.

How do I deal with that? It seems like trying to push to a new repo won’t work, because LFS tries to reupload the files to the new repo rather than just having references to the old files. Will I need to buy extra storage for the new repo and then upload? How do I do it?

(Also, it’s possible I was doing it all wrong; I wasn’t 100% comfortable with my understanding of how filter-repo works. I’d appreciate a more step-by-step answer with the right commands and so on if possible!)