Why Google Takeout scrambles photo dates and how to fix them
When users export their Google Photos library via Google Takeout, most images incorrectly land on the export date rather than their original capture dates in apps like Apple Photos or Lightroom. This happens because Takeout stores the correct date metadata — including when a photo was taken, its location, and captions — inside a separate JSON sidecar file that photo apps never read. Instead, these apps rely on embedded EXIF data or the file's modified timestamp, which Takeout sets to the day of export. A developer built a tool called Takeoutfix to read the JSON files and write the correct dates, GPS data, and captions back into the media files. Complicating matters further, Google changed its JSON naming format in 2024 from a simple '.json' suffix to '.supplemental-metadata.json', causing older fix tools to fail.
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