Comment on Why is Google takeout so bitchy?
Darohan@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Just gone through this whole process myself. My god does it suck. Another thing you’ll want to be aware of around Takeout with Google Photos is that the photo metadata isn’t attached as EXIF like with a normal service, but rather it’s given as an accompanying JSON file for each image file. I’m using Memories for Nextcloud, and it has a tool that can restore the EXIF metadata using those files, but it’s not exact and now I have about 1.5k images tagged as being from this year when they’re really from 2018 or before. I’m looking at writing my own tool to restore some of this metadata but it’s going to be a right pain in the ass.
They also don’t always keep the metadata in the same archive (zip or tar) with the pictures they belong with, and that can throw off imports with tools that process Google Takeout archives directly. Its a pretty nasty solution, for real.
I moved about 140GB to ente.io before they had their newer takeout process, but some destinations can enable third party apps (like rclone) to do cloud to cloud. Nor sure which work best, since I couldn’t go that route myself.
Ah great, that could be why a bunch of my photos didn’t get metadata. I’ll look into that, thanks for the tip.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Wow thanks for that. I was looking into github.com/…/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper but I haven’t gotten to that step yet
Darohan@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Ooh, might look into that instead, actually. I always love a reason to write myself a little tool, but dealing with Google’s bull makes it much less appealing to me when existing tools can do it for me.