Google Takeout Metadata Tools Compared

You exported your Google Photos library with Takeout. Now you have a pile of zip files, thousands of mysterious JSON sidecar files, and photos that all show today's date instead of when they were taken. You need a tool to fix this.

There are several options, from command-line power tools to browser extensions to dedicated desktop apps. We tested all of them. Here's an honest breakdown of what each one does well, where it falls short, and which one fits your situation.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Here's the overview. Scroll down for detailed breakdowns of each tool.

The Command-Line Route

If you're comfortable with a terminal, there are free tools that can get you part of the way. The fundamental challenge with command-line scripts is that they're write-once-and-hope: a developer builds one to fix their own export, it works for that specific Takeout format, and then Google changes something. Unless the developer keeps updating the tool — and most don't — the script silently breaks on newer exports. That said, here's what's available.

ExifTool — the Swiss Army knife (assembly required)

ExifTool by Phil Harvey is the gold standard for reading and writing photo metadata. It's free, open-source, and runs on everything. If a metadata field exists, ExifTool can read it and write it. We use ExifTool as part of our own pipeline inside Metadata Fixer — it took us years to get the commands, edge cases, and error handling stable.

That's the key distinction: ExifTool is a tool, not a solution. It's the engine inside the car, not the car. You still need to write the scripts that tell it what to do with Google Takeout's specific quirks — and there are many:

• Google truncates long filenames in the JSON sidecar, so a file named IMG_20190814_vacation_with_family_at_the_beach.jpg gets a JSON named IMG_20190814_vacation_with_family_at_the_b.json. Your script needs to handle this.
• Google splits photos and their JSON files across different zips. If you extract one zip at a time, photos and their metadata may not be in the same folder.
• Timestamps in the JSON are in Unix epoch format (seconds since 1970), and timezone handling is inconsistent. A naive conversion gives you UTC times, not the local time where the photo was taken.
• ExifTool processes files one thread at a time. A 50,000-photo library takes hours.
• You need to extract all your zip files first. A 100 GB export needs 100 GB of free space just for extraction.

Best for: developers and photographers who already know ExifTool and want full control over exactly which metadata fields get written. Not practical for a one-time Takeout fix unless you enjoy writing bash scripts.

GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper (GPTH) — the popular tool that doesn't actually fix metadata

GPTH is the most popular open-source tool for this job, with 5,500+ stars on GitHub and over 160,000 downloads. Originally a Python script, it was rewritten in Dart and is now available as a standalone executable. It takes your extracted Takeout folder, matches JSON metadata to photos, and organizes everything into a chronological folder structure.

For years, this was the recommendation in every Reddit thread and forum post. It handles the most common Takeout scenarios and it's completely free.

The problem: GPTH hasn't been updated since September 2023 (last release) and the last commit was January 2025. There are 78 open issues on GitHub with no responses. Google has changed the Takeout export format since then, and GPTH hasn't kept up:

• Does not write EXIF metadata. This is the big one. GPTH only sets your files' filesystem "last modified" timestamp. It does not write dates, GPS coordinates, or anything else into the actual photo's EXIF data. If you import these files into Apple Photos, Lightroom, or a NAS, they may still show the wrong date because those apps read EXIF, not filesystem timestamps. The README tells users to run ExifTool manually as a separate step.
• Descriptions are lost entirely. If you captioned photos in Google Photos — trip names, people's names, notes about the moment — GPTH doesn't transfer them anywhere. They're silently discarded.
• Broken on new Takeout exports. Google changed the JSON sidecar naming convention to .supplemental-metadata.json. GPTH can't find these files — there are multiple open issues about it with no fix merged.
• Requires extracting all zips first. A 100 GB export needs 100 GB free just for extraction.

Best for: smaller libraries where you only need filesystem timestamps (not EXIF) and your export uses the older JSON naming format. Still works for the basics, but don't expect bug fixes.

GoogleTakeoutFixer — two months old, still working out the basics

GoogleTakeoutFixer is the newest entry — a Go application launched in January 2026 with a basic GUI on Windows and command-line support on Mac and Linux. It writes EXIF metadata, organizes files into year/month folders, and uses symlinks for album photos to avoid duplicates. It's two months old with around 270 downloads.

• Still requires extracting all zip files before processing.
• Severe performance problems at scale. The developer opened an issue about the tool progressively slowing down and the GUI lagging on libraries over 1 TB. The root cause: it re-reads the same directories from disk for every single file instead of caching them in memory. These are the kind of architectural problems that surface once real users show up with real libraries.
• No Live Photo pairing — HEIC and MOV files are treated separately.
• No corrupted archive detection.

Best for: small to medium libraries where extraction time and performance aren't a concern. Free and actively developed, but still in the early stages of discovering the edge cases that come with scale.

Other Open-Source Scripts

There are dozens of smaller scripts on GitHub: google-photos-exif (1,000 stars, last updated May 2024), google-photos-takeout-date-fixer (last updated 2020), and several others. Most are weekend projects that solve one person's specific problem and haven't been touched since. They work for simple cases but break on the edge cases that only show up with large, messy libraries.

We want this to be a complete guide, but new scripts for fixing Takeout metadata appear every week. If yours isn't listed here, drop us a line at hello@metadatafixer.com and we'll take a look.

The Browser Route: Skip Takeout Entirely

A different approach: instead of fixing Takeout exports after the fact, download photos directly from Google Photos with metadata already attached. The tradeoff is that browser-based tools live at Google's mercy — they either scrape the Google Photos web interface (which breaks when Google updates their site) or use the Google Photos API (which returns degraded video quality and no GPS data). It's a clever workaround, but it's a workaround.

Quiver Photos — niche downloader ($50)

Quiver Photos is a solo-developer desktop app that costs $50 for a lifetime license (first 1,000 items free). Here's how it works: you download a binary, it downloads its own bundled Chrome browser, you log into your Google account inside that bundled Chrome, and the app scrapes your photos through it.

• You're logging into Google inside a third-party Chrome binary. This isn't a Chrome Web Store extension that goes through Google's review process. It's a closed-source executable that ships its own browser and asks for your Google credentials. For an app with a handful of reviews and no public audit, that's a significant trust ask.
• Setup can take longer than the actual download. You download a binary, it downloads its own Chrome slowly, you configure it, log in — by the time you're running, you could have already finished downloading your library with a browser extension.
• $50 is the highest price point in this comparison — for a download tool, not a metadata fixer.
• The end result is the same thing you get from Snapback (free, reviewed in the Chrome Web Store) plus Metadata Fixer — but through a safer workflow and less setup.

Best for: hard to recommend given the security tradeoffs. If you're comfortable running a closed-source binary that bundles its own Chrome and logging into your Google account through it, it works — but safer alternatives exist.

Proper Takeout — the paid Google bypass

Proper Takeout is a Chrome and Edge extension that downloads photos directly from the Google Photos web interface. You browse to an album or search for a year, click "Takeout," and it downloads everything with metadata embedded. No zips, no JSON sidecars.

• Costs €24.99 (one-time) or €4.99/month after a 100-item free tier.
• Relies on scrolling the Google Photos web page to discover your photos. This is inherently fragile — if Google changes their web interface, the extension breaks until the developer pushes an update.
• Can't handle massive libraries in one go. You search by year or album and download in batches. Their own FAQ acknowledges the browser may become unresponsive during large downloads.
• Doesn't help if you already have Takeout exports. If you already downloaded your zips from Google, Proper Takeout can't fix them — it's a download tool, not a metadata fixer. (This applies to all browser-based download tools, including Snapback.)

Best for: people who haven't started their export yet and want to skip Takeout entirely. Not useful if you already have Takeout zip files.

Snapback (Free) — the free downloader (no metadata writing — by design)

Snapback is our own free Chrome extension. It downloads photos directly from Google Photos — your entire library, shared albums, individual albums — with no item limits.

Unlike Proper Takeout, Snapback does not try to write metadata into files during download. That's a deliberate choice. Writing EXIF data inside a browser extension is fragile — it works until it doesn't, and it breaks hardest on the large libraries where our users live. Instead, Snapback downloads original quality files with JSON sidecar metadata, giving you a clean foundation. To embed that metadata into the actual files, run them through Metadata Fixer, which handles the heavy lifting in a proper desktop environment. Once you're done, Snapback can clean up all the downloaded JSON sidecar files with one click.

• Same browser-based limitation as Proper Takeout — depends on Google's web interface.
• Downloads metadata as JSON sidecars, not embedded in files. Requires a second step to write EXIF.

Best for: anyone who wants to download from Google Photos for free and doesn't mind a two-step process (download with Snapback, fix metadata with Metadata Fixer).

The Desktop App: Metadata Fixer

Metadata Fixer is a dedicated desktop application for Mac, Windows, and Linux built specifically for fixing Google Takeout exports. It's been doing this since 2021 and has processed libraries for over 150,000 users.

Full disclosure: this is our product, so take what follows with that in mind. We'll explain what it does and why we built it the way we did. The comparison table above puts it side by side with everything else so you can judge for yourself.

When we started building Metadata Fixer in 2021, the approach was the same as everyone else's: extract the zips, match JSON files to photos by filename, write the dates with ExifTool. It worked for small, clean exports. Then users showed up with 200 GB libraries spanning 15 years, photos split across 40 zip files, filenames truncated in ways no one documented, and JSON naming conventions that changed between exports. We learned that the "extract and script" approach breaks at exactly the scale where it matters most — when you have irreplaceable photos and can't afford to lose metadata. Everything below is what we built to solve that.

Processes zip files directly

No extraction needed. Drop your Takeout zip files in and Metadata Fixer streams through them directly. A 100 GB export doesn't need 100 GB of free space — the app reads from the compressed archives. This isn't just a convenience feature: it's how we solve the cross-zip matching problem. Google splits photos and their JSON metadata across different zip files. Every other tool requires you to extract everything into one folder and hope the filenames line up. We read across all zips simultaneously, so a photo in zip 3 finds its JSON in zip 7.

The app also detects corrupted zip files before processing. If a Takeout download was interrupted or corrupted, you know immediately — not after hours of processing when you discover broken photos.

100% JSON-to-photo matching

Google Takeout has accumulated years of quirks. Filenames get truncated at 47 characters. Duplicate names across albums get numbered inconsistently. Edited photos get an -edited suffix in some exports and not others. The JSON naming format changed to .supplemental-metadata.json in recent exports, breaking every tool that hasn't updated. Five years and 150,000 users means we've seen every variation Google has shipped — and every photo gets matched to its metadata.

Complete metadata writing

Most tools write the date and call it done. Metadata Fixer writes every field Google exports in the JSON: date taken, GPS coordinates, descriptions you added in Google Photos, camera information, and more. Your photo captions, location pins, and album notes survive the export intact.

It also handles timezone corrections. Google's JSON timestamps are UTC, and a naive conversion produces wrong local times. Your beach sunset photo should say 7:30 PM in Bali, not 11:30 AM in UTC. Metadata Fixer uses the GPS coordinates from the JSON to determine the correct local timezone and writes that into the EXIF data.

Live Photo pairing

If you shot Live Photos on an iPhone, Google Takeout exports the HEIC still image and its companion MOV video as separate, unrelated files. Import them into Apple Photos like that and you get a still photo and a random 3-second video clip. Metadata Fixer automatically pairs them back together with the correct Apple metadata, so they import as a single Live Photo — tap and hold to see the motion, exactly like on your phone. No other tool in this comparison does this.

Pause, resume, and crash recovery

A 100,000-photo library takes time to process. Close your laptop, lose power, need to restart — Metadata Fixer picks up exactly where it left off. No re-processing files that were already fixed, no risk of partially processed output. Compare that to tools that move files destructively and leave you with a half-finished mess if anything goes wrong.

Super fast (multi-core pipeline)

ExifTool and most scripts process one file at a time, single-threaded. Metadata Fixer runs a multi-process pipeline across all your CPU cores — reading zips, matching JSON, writing EXIF, and pairing Live Photos in parallel. A library that takes hours single-threaded finishes in a fraction of the time. You can watch it happen in real time on the results screen, which shows exactly which files are being processed and what metadata was recovered.

Best for: anyone who has Google Takeout zip files and wants their metadata fixed correctly without technical setup. Particularly valuable for large libraries, Live Photo users, and anyone who's already tried a free tool and hit edge cases it couldn't handle.

Which Tool Should You Use?

It depends on your situation:

• You're a developer who wants full control: Use ExifTool. Write your own scripts, handle the edge cases yourself. You'll learn a lot about EXIF metadata in the process.
• You want a free tool and have a small library: Try GoogleTakeoutFixer — it's actively maintained and free. GPTH still works for basic cases but isn't being updated.
• You haven't exported yet and want to skip Takeout: Use Snapback (free) to download directly from Google Photos, then run the files through Metadata Fixer to embed the metadata.
• You already have Takeout zips and want them fixed properly: Use Metadata Fixer. It's the only tool that processes zips directly, handles every Google quirk, pairs Live Photos, and has five years of edge-case fixes built in.

Frequently Asked Questions