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Comment by hruzgar | Hacker News Reader

I started using Google photos first but then stopped using it after I found out that they completely lock you in and you can't really export all your photos seamlessly while still having the time stamps. Now I have all of my photos on onedrive but will migrate to immich in a few months. Open source and selfhosted btw. https://github.com/immich-app/immich

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From what I understand, the correct time stamps are maintained in the EXIF data when you export from Google Photos, and you can use tools like exiv2 on Linux to set the file modification timestamp to match the EXIF one:

  exiv2 -T rename image.jpg

I don't think this is Google being actively malicious, but just file systems in general handling dates in a confusing way.

You can easily encounter exactly the same problem e.g. if you are copying images between systems with an external USB drive and you are not careful about how it's done. E.g. Windows Explorer will change the date to "now" if you do a simple copy, to avoid this you need to use "robocopy" or do a move instead of a copy.

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