Why Your Google Takeout Dates Are Wrong (And How to Fix Them)
By The Pluto Photos Team · Published · Updated · 5 min read
Google Takeout exports strip date metadata from your photos and bury it in JSON files. Here's what's happening and how to get your timeline back.
The symptom
You export your Google Photos library using Takeout. You open the folder and everything looks fine — the photos are there, the folders have names. But then you import them into any photo app and your entire timeline is scrambled. Photos from 2018 show up in 2022. A trip to Italy is dated last Tuesday.
This hits almost everyone who leaves Google Photos, and it's confusing because the photos look fine when you open them individually.
What's actually happening
When Google stores your photos, it manages the metadata (dates, GPS, descriptions) in its own database. When you export via Takeout, Google writes that metadata into small .json files alongside each image.
The problem is that many of your actual image files have their EXIF date set to the upload date rather than the capture date. If you uploaded a batch of old photos in 2022, those images now say "2022" in their EXIF data, even though you took them in 2018.
The correct date is in the JSON file. But most photo apps don't read those JSON files — they read the EXIF data embedded in the image.
Here's what a Takeout folder typically looks like:
Photos from 2020/
IMG_4521.jpg
IMG_4521.jpg.json ← has the real date
IMG_4522.HEIC
IMG_4522.HEIC.json ← has the real date
metadata.json
The JSON files contain something like:
{
"photoTakenTime": {
"timestamp": "1592611200"
},
"geoData": {
"latitude": 45.523,
"longitude": -122.676
}
}
That timestamp is the real capture date. But it's not in the image file itself.
How Pluto Photos fixes it
Pluto Photos has a dedicated Google Takeout importer that reads those JSON sidecars, extracts the correct timestamps and GPS coordinates, and applies them during import. Your photos end up on the right dates in your timeline.
It also handles the annoying edge cases:
- Filenames truncated by Google (the JSON name doesn't always match the image name exactly)
- Duplicate photos that appear in both date folders and album folders
- The timezone offsets that Google sometimes gets wrong
Other options
If you don't want to use Pluto Photos, you can fix the metadata manually using ExifTool. It's a command-line tool and the process is fiddly, but it works:
# Match JSON dates back to image EXIF data (one file at a time)
# This is tedious for large libraries but possible
exiftool -overwrite_original -DateTimeOriginal="2020:06:20 12:00:00" photo.jpg
The problem is you'd need to script this across your entire export, parsing each JSON file and matching it to the right image. It's doable but not fun.
Pluto Photos automates all of this. Download it here — the Takeout importer is part of the Pro tier.
Part of the Google Takeout & Google Photos Migration Guides guide.
Download Pluto Photos for Windows, macOS or Linux, or read more from the blog.