How to Download Google Photos Without Losing Metadata

You download your photos from Google Photos, open the folder, and everything is dated today. The locations are gone. Sorted by date, a decade of your life is now one afternoon.

This is a real and well-known problem, and it has a real fix. It depends entirely on how you download the files.

Why it happens

Google Photos stores much of your photo information in its own database, not in the file. Dates you corrected, locations you added by hand, album membership, descriptions: all of that lives in Google’s records.

When you download, you get two different behaviours:

Saving individual photos from the web or app. The download button on a single photo hands you a file with much of its metadata removed. This is the path most people take and it’s the one that loses the most.

Google Takeout. This exports the whole library and preserves the information, but not inside the images. It writes a .json sidecar next to each file containing the timestamp, the geodata, the description and more.

That JSON is the fix and the trap at the same time. The data is all there. It’s just that your operating system, your photo app and your backup drive don’t read .json files. They read EXIF. So you have your metadata, in a format nothing you own understands.

The right way: Takeout, then merge

1. Export with Takeout

Go to takeout.google.com → Deselect all → tick Google Photos → choose your albums or the whole library → export.

Two settings matter:

• Format: .zip (works everywhere) or .tgz (better for very large libraries)
• Archive size: split at 10GB, 50GB. A single giant file is more likely to fail mid-download

For a big library the email can take hours or days. It’s a queue, not a button.

2. Merge the JSON back into the files

This is the step everyone skips, and it’s the one that matters. The JSON sidecars need to be read and their contents written into each image’s EXIF.

• Google Photos Takeout Helper is free, open source, and purpose-built for exactly this. Point it at the Takeout folder, it merges the sidecars, fixes the dates, and organises the output. Start here.
• exiftool. If you’re comfortable on a command line, it can do it directly and gives you complete control.

3. Verify before you delete anything

Open a handful of files across different years and check the date and GPS actually read back. Do not delete your Google library until you’ve confirmed this. The whole point of the exercise is not losing the data, and this is the step that proves you didn’t.

What Takeout still won’t give you

Being straight about the limits:

• Edits are baked in or lost. Depending on your settings you may get the edited version, the original, or both, but not the reversible edit history.
• Album structure comes through as folders and JSON, not as albums any app will recognise.
• Faces and people tags don’t come out at all.
• Motion Photos may split into a still and a video.
• Shared library content that isn’t yours isn’t included.

If you already downloaded and lost everything

Assuming you still have the Google library: do it again, properly, with Takeout. The originals are still up there and still have their data. The download was lossy; the source wasn’t.

If the library is gone and the files are all dated today, the metadata is genuinely lost. Some of it can be reconstructed by hand, since you know roughly when and where a photo was taken, and you can write a location back into a photo one at a time. Slow, but better than nothing.

Prevention

• Use Takeout, never the per-photo download, for anything you care about.
• Merge the sidecars immediately, while you still remember what the folder is.
• Keep the original Takeout archive until the merged copy is verified and backed up.
• Check a few files from each year, not just the first one.

If you want to understand what’s actually in those fields before you start, here’s the plain-English tour.

FAQ

Does Google Takeout preserve GPS location? Yes, but in the JSON sidecar, not in the image file. You have to merge it in.

Why are all my downloaded photos dated today? The file’s creation date is the download time, and the original DateTimeOriginal wasn’t written into the file. Merging the sidecars fixes it.

Does Google Photos strip EXIF from shared links? Google removes or restricts location data on some shared content. Your own library keeps it.

Is there a way to avoid the JSON step? Not with Takeout. Some paid migration tools bundle the merge, but they’re doing the same job.