Google Takeout & Google Photos Migration Guides

Leaving Google Photos is mostly one technical problem wearing several disguises: your capture dates are not inside your photos, and an import that ignores that fact silently flattens your entire history into one day.

Overview

A Google Takeout export is not a photo library. It is a set of ZIP archives containing your original files, split across album folders, with a JSON sidecar beside almost every photo — and that sidecar holds information that is genuinely nowhere else, including in many cases the date the photo was taken.

That is the whole difficulty. Windows, macOS and most photo viewers do not read those sidecars, so a naively-imported export arrives dated to the day you unzipped it. It looks like it worked. You find out it did not when you try to browse by year.

Pluto Photos' [Cloud Import](/features/cloud-import/) tool reads the sidecar JSON during import and writes the real capture date and GPS into your library, instead of falling back to the file's modification time. The guides below cover the export itself, what is inside the sidecars, why the dates break in tools that skip them, and how to check a migration actually succeeded before you cancel the subscription.

Start here

I Left Google Photos. Here's How I Did It Without Losing Anything. — A walkthrough of exporting from Google Photos via Takeout and actually keeping all your dates, locations, and albums intact in a local photo manager.

Supporting guides

What Are Google Takeout JSON Files? — Every photo in a Google Takeout export comes with a JSON file beside it. They look like junk, they are not, and deleting them is how people lose fifteen years of photo dates.
Why Your Google Takeout Dates Are Wrong (And How to Fix Them) — 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.
Google Takeout Organizer: How to Actually Use Your Exported Photos — Google Takeout dumps your photos into a chaotic mess of folders and JSON sidecars. Here's how to organize a Takeout export so your library is actually usable.
How to Organize Photos Without the Cloud — You can have search, face grouping, albums and a map without a subscription or an upload. Here is what a fully local photo library requires, what it costs you, and the one job it genuinely makes harder.

The features that do this

Try it on your own library

Pluto Photos is an offline photo organizer for Windows, macOS and Linux. The free tier handles 500 photos with no account and no time limit. Download Pluto Photos or see pricing.