Thanks Google Photos

I recently decided to move all of my photos off of Google Photos and into Apple iCloud when I encountered a really disappointing issue when importing all of my photos into the Photos app on OS X. The only way to get a copy of every single photo on my entire Google account was to download it through Google Takeout, and so I decided to go with that option.

Before I started exporting all of my photos, they were neatly organized on Google Photos by date, with all of the correct information. Photos taken in 2011 were in the year 2011 on Google. Unfortunately, this sort of information was not relayed very well to Google Takeout.

When I downloaded and extracted my takeout ZIP archives, I found that all of my photos were organized into folders based on the day that they were taken. Along with the photo was a .json file that contained no information about the actual date that the photo was taken. The only information that related to each photo was a metadata.json file that only gave me, roughly, the date and time that the photos in that folder were uploaded. It did not relay the correct information about each individual photo in the folder. The modification date and time on photos from 2011, strangely, were set to just a few days ago. I’m guessing this has to do with the caching mechanism inside Google Photos, but I’m not entirely sure.

When I went to import all of my photos into the Photos app on OS X, the date and time were never translated over, so I ended up with 6,000 photos taken in a single day.

So, long story short, don’t use Google Photos if you want to keep the date and time on your photo exports to be accurate. I’m at least glad that I can rely on Apple to keep track of the date and time correctly.