Google Takeout Metadata Fixer — Alternatives 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 alternatives, from command-line power tools to browser extensions to dedicated desktop apps. 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 GPTH column describes the maintained Xentraxx fork. “Not documented” means the project's own README doesn't say either way. Open-source facts were checked against each project's GitHub page on October 8, 2026.

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 free command-line favorite (use the maintained fork)

GPTH is the open-source tool most Reddit threads recommend for Google Takeout. There are now two versions worth knowing about, and the difference matters:

• The original (TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper) has not had a release since v3.4.3 in September 2023, and its last commit was in January 2025. Its README says it sets each file's “last modified” time and lists writing JSON data back into EXIF as a to-do, so apps that read EXIF (Apple Photos, Lightroom, most NAS software) can still show the wrong date.
• The maintained fork (Xentraxx/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper, v6.4.0 released September 2026) writes dates, GPS coordinates and captions into EXIF by default. JPEG files are handled natively; HEIC, PNG and videos need ExifTool installed. It can extract your Takeout zips itself (faster with 7-Zip), removes identical duplicates by content hash, and offers several album modes.

Where the fork asks more of you:

• It runs in a terminal. There is an interactive prompt mode, but no graphical app.
• It unpacks everything to disk first, so you need free space for the extracted export on top of the zips.
• Live Photos stay as two separate files. The README says Apple Live Photo image and video parts are passed through separately, and calls its Pixel motion-photo modes a work in progress.
• Full metadata needs ExifTool. Without it, captions, dates and GPS are written to JPEGs only.

Best for: people comfortable on the command line who have the disk space and want a free, open-source tool. Make sure you download the maintained fork, not the 2023 original.

GoogleTakeoutFixer — a newer free option with a Windows GUI

GoogleTakeoutFixer is a Go application launched in January 2026, with a basic GUI on Windows and command-line support on Mac and Linux. It writes EXIF dates and GPS, organizes files into year/month folders, and uses symlinks for album photos to avoid duplicates. Its latest release is v1.4.0 (March 2026), with the most recent commit in May 2026.

• Requires extracting all zip files before processing.
• The current release notes warn that some files may be skipped silently, so check file counts afterwards.
• Performance on very large libraries is a known issue. The developer opened an issue about slowdowns and GUI lag on libraries over 1 TB.
• No Live Photo pairing — HEIC and MOV files are treated separately.

Best for: Windows users with small to medium libraries who want a free app with a basic interface and can verify the output.

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. Most other tools have you extract everything into one folder first and rely on the filenames lining 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.

Thorough 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 a lot of the variations Google has shipped, and anything that still can't be matched is reported so you know exactly what to check.

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 don't mind a terminal: Use the maintained GPTH fork with ExifTool installed. On Windows with a smaller library, GoogleTakeoutFixer is a free option with a basic GUI.
• 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 reads the zips without extracting them, pairs Live Photos, detects corrupted archives, and has five years of edge-case fixes built in. Try it free on 100 files first.

Frequently Asked Questions