thelastgimbus/googlephotostakeouthelper

Google Photos Takeout Helper is a tool that cleans up and reorganizes the archive you get when you export your photos from Google Photos using Google Takeout. When you request your data from Google Takeout, the download arrives as a collection of zip files that unpack into many small folders, with each photo accompanied by a separate JSON file containing its metadata. Finding and sorting through all of that manually is tedious, and many standard photo apps do not know how to read the JSON files to restore correct dates. This tool processes the entire Takeout archive and produces a single output folder with all your photos in it, in chronological order, with file timestamps set to match the original capture date from the JSON metadata. You can also choose to have photos sorted into subfolders by month. The tool moves files by default rather than copying them, so the README advises keeping your original zip files until you have verified everything looks correct. Since version 3.2.0 the tool runs interactively: you download an executable for your system, run it, and follow the on-screen prompts without needing to know any command-line flags. Pre-built executables are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and there is also a package on the Arch Linux AUR. A manual command-line mode is also available for running the tool on headless machines, network-attached storage devices, or in automation scripts. The README recommends an optional follow-up step using a separate tool called exiftool to embed the original date into the photo files themselves as EXIF metadata. This ensures the creation date is stored inside the image file and not just in the filesystem timestamp, which can get reset when copying files on Android. The README also suggests several alternatives to Google Photos for people who want to self-host their photo library going forward, including Immich and Photoprism.