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Comment by sMarsIntruder | Hacker News Reader

This guide tells you to delete the JSON file that are crucial for both geotag info and in general EXIF.

I don’t recall the script I used last time, but GitHub is pretty full of good Samaritans, eg: https://github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif

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Json takes up barely any space, so long term storage isn't a problem unless you are pedantic about adding a few extra megabytes compared to your terrabytes of photos.

I recently went through all my Google Photos photos, downloaded everything to physical drives, and then deleted the 80% that are just redundant. I found that selecting photos in batches of months or days, making sure that each batch is less than (Thot Shalt Not Download More Than) 500 images, then downloading in google photos was more reliable than Google takeout, which had a very high rate of download failure.

On the topic of seemingly redundant files, what I got back was a bunch of useless .MP files, but a little sleuthing revealed these to be top shot motion videos. https://support.google.com/googlecamera/answer/9937175?hl=en

I guess Google has a licence issue with publishing trillions of .mp4 files, or changes their extension to .MP for some internal purpose. But the upshot is a horrible user experience, many thousands of users will be left scratching their heads before throwing these videos of cherished memories away.

Anyway, if you want to batch rename any .MP files on Windows: Navigate to their folder and enter cmd into the file path field, in the terminal rename the extensions using:

ren *.MP *.mp4

It’s pretty dark that Google doesn’t release your photos back to you in a way that makes it easy for ordinary folk to migrate to another provider.

To play the devil's advocate, this is likely an artifact of how they store the images. Embedded EXIF does not make for an efficient filesize and separating EXIF from image data means they can have different image sizes with a single source of EXIF data.

I think that’s a fair point, but then one could argue the onus should be on them to “reconstitute” the files before export by merging the EXIF back in.

I mean the point is that you can get it out, the JSON export just happens to be the easiest way for them.

It's even GDPR compliant.

It’s one thing for a techy to get it out and know how to mash it all back together but quite another for my mum, for example, who would find it potentially an insurmountable blocker to changing her cloud storage provider.

Honest question (I don't know much about about EXIF), but wouldn't the metadata be peanuts compared to the actual image data?

I just recently did Google Takeout to duplicate my backup into iCloud and I found the EXIF data in the files to be 100% there, down to the GPS location and lens the photo was taken with.

I've been wondering if the different experiences are related to the "Original Size" setting in Google Photos. I've always stored things at original size since originally using Google Photos years ago. I'm wondering if the compression they do when not using this option causes the EXIF data to only exist in the JSONs.

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