How to export your Google Photos library without losing the metadata
I exported my Google Photos library recently, unzipped the archive, and opened a photo from 2019. The date said the photo was created yesterday. The GPS coordinates were gone. The album it belonged to was nowhere to be seen.
Nothing was actually lost. Google Takeout did give me everything. It just did not put the metadata where I expected it to be.
If you are planning to export your own library, this is the part most guides skip. Here is what I did to keep the dates, locations, and album structure intact.
What Google Takeout actually gives you
When you download your Google Photos library through Takeout, you get a zip archive. Inside, for every photo, you get two files:
IMG_1234.jpg— the image itselfIMG_1234.json— a sidecar file containing the metadata: original date, GPS coordinates, description, and album membership
The metadata that used to be embedded in your photo’s EXIF data (or that Google inferred from your upload) now lives in a separate JSON file next to it. If you upload the photos anywhere else without re-merging the JSON back into the images, the receiving service has no idea when or where the photo was taken.
The metadata article covers what EXIF is and why so much of your photo lives outside the image itself. This is exactly the situation where that matters.
Step 1: Request the export properly
Go to takeout.google.com and select only Google Photos (deselect everything else so you are not waiting for Drive, Gmail, and Calendar to bundle in).
Two things worth setting before you hit export:
File type: .zip. Not .tgz. Zip works on every operating system without extra tools.
Max archive size: 50 GB. Google will split your library across multiple archives, and 50 GB is the largest chunk it will produce. Fewer files to download and reassemble.
Then submit the request. Google emails you when the archives are ready.
Step 2: Expect it to take a while
A small library might be ready in an hour. A library with tens of thousands of photos can take a full day or two. In my case, around 200 GB, it took roughly 36 hours before all the archive parts were available.
Download every part before you continue. Missing one means missing a chunk of your library.
Step 3: Re-merge the JSON metadata into the JPEGs
This is the step that saves your library.
There are two tools worth knowing about. Both are free and open source.
Option A: exiftool (exiftool.org). The universal command-line tool for reading and writing EXIF data. Every photo workflow eventually touches it. On macOS: brew install exiftool. On Linux: your package manager has it. On Windows: download the installer from the site.
Once installed, you can loop through your Takeout folder and pull the JSON data back into each image. There are community scripts that do exactly this, and the exiftool documentation includes examples.
Option B: google-photos-exif (github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif). A Node.js tool built specifically for this purpose. Point it at your unzipped Takeout folder, and it walks through every photo, reads the sidecar JSON, and writes the metadata back into the image. This is the one I used. It handled the whole library in about 20 minutes.
Either tool gets you to the same place: JPEGs with their original dates, GPS coordinates, and camera info restored.
What good looks like
Open a photo after running the tool. Right-click, get info (or view properties on Windows). You should now see:
- The correct date taken, matching when you actually took the photo
- GPS coordinates if the photo had them originally
- Camera model and settings where available
If those fields are populated, your library is portable. Any service you upload it to next will see the photos in the right order, on the right dates, and in the right places on a map.
Where to put them next
That is the other half of the migration story, and we already have both a walkthrough and a tool for it.
If you are moving to PixelUnion, our built-in migration portal handles the upload for you. The full step-by-step, with screenshots, lives in our Google Photos migration guide. Our earlier blog post covers the migration flow end to end, including what to expect when you first log in.
The point of this post is upstream of both: whatever you decide to do with the photos next, the metadata you spent years accumulating deserves to come with them.
Curious what else is baked into your photos beyond dates and locations? The metadata article breaks down everything a single photo file carries, from device model to camera settings, and what that means for your privacy.