I Left Google Photos. Here's How I Did It Without Losing Anything.
By The Pluto Photos Team · Published · Updated · 7 min read
A walkthrough of exporting from Google Photos via Takeout and actually keeping all your dates, locations, and albums intact in a local photo manager.
The problem with Takeout
Google makes it easy to request your data through Google Takeout. They'll bundle up all your photos into zip files and let you download them. Sounds great. Then you open the folder and realize it's a mess.
Your photos are split into date-based folders like "Photos from 2021" and album folders like "Trip to Portland." Many photos appear in multiple folders. Filenames are truncated. And the worst part — Google strips the EXIF dates from a lot of your images and replaces them with the upload date. The real dates are buried in little JSON files sitting next to each photo.
If you just dump these folders into any photo app, your entire timeline will be wrong. Photos from 2018 will show up as 2023 because that's when you re-uploaded them.
How I handled it
In Pluto Photos, there's a Cloud Import option specifically for Google Takeout. I point it at my extracted Takeout folder and it does a few things:
- It reads those JSON sidecar files and pulls out the original date, GPS coordinates, and description.
- It applies them to the right photo — even when Google's filename truncation makes the matching annoying.
- It skips duplicates if the same photo appears in multiple Takeout folders.
After import, my timeline actually looked correct. Photos from 2018 were in 2018. Vacations had their GPS coordinates. Album names came through as tags.
Step by step
Here's the actual process:
Export from Google:
- Go to takeout.google.com
- Deselect everything, then check just Google Photos
- Pick .zip format and a reasonable max file size (I used 10 GB chunks)
- Hit export and wait — large libraries take hours, sometimes a day
Download and extract:
Download all the zip files. Extract them all into one parent folder. You'll end up with a structure like:
Takeout/
Google Photos/
Photos from 2020/
Photos from 2021/
Trip to Portland/
...
Import into Pluto Photos:
- Open Pluto Photos and create a project (or use an existing one)
- Open the Cloud Import tool from the toolbar and choose the Google Takeout tab
- Pick the extracted Takeout folder
- Wait for it to process — it reads every JSON file, matches metadata, and deduplicates
After import:
- Run the duplicate finder to catch any overlaps with photos you already had
- Check the face detection results — it runs automatically on import
The whole thing took me about 20 minutes of actual work for a ~40 GB Takeout export. Most of that was waiting for zip extraction and the initial thumbnail scan.
What actually transfers
Dates, GPS locations, descriptions, and album names all come through. Favorites from Google Photos get converted to star ratings. Both original and edited versions are imported if you had Google's auto-edits applied.
The one thing that doesn't transfer perfectly is Google's auto-generated "Memories" and collages — those are proprietary to Google's platform.
Was it worth it?
Having everything local again is a relief. My library loads instantly, I can browse it locally without any cloud dependency, and I'm not burning $3/month on a storage tier that keeps wanting to upsell me. If you've been thinking about leaving Google Photos, the import process is honestly less painful than I expected.
Download Pluto Photos — the free tier handles 500 photos. Cloud Import is part of the Pro tier ($29 one-time).
Part of the Google Takeout & Google Photos Migration Guides guide.
Download Pluto Photos for Windows, macOS or Linux, or read more from the blog.