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Comment by datavirtue | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know about Google Takeout despite having searched for a way to get my photos out years ago. Blows me away.

The problem with Takeout is it removes the metadata from your photos. Google wants you locked in to Google Photos. Years ago they also removed the ability to sync with Google Drive, so the only way to get your photos out without losing metadata is to download them directly from photos.google.com, 50 at a time

AFAIK Takeout + Photos returns the original image file exactly as it originally existed, EXIF intact. Any additional metadata you have added manually is placed in a JSON file with the same name, adjacent to the image file.

It sounds like you want Photos to somehow merge that added metadata back into the image files, altering them. I'm quite confident that there would be an equal number of people complaining about changing their originals, if photos did that.

No, they remove all of it, date/time, camera, location, all of that is in the JSON. There are 3rd party tools to automate adding it back, but direct from Google all of your photos will not have any of the metadata

Based on my November 2020 Google takeout of 30 gigabytes of photos that I just spot sampled from my Synology, I can verify that the EXIF information on my photos from 2012 (jpg format) include the phone that I took the picture with, the aperture and shutter speed, the date and the time. I didn't do anything other than download the zip files and then extract them.

Beware when relying on Google Takeout for e-mail backup if you have old e-mails in other encodings than utf-8 : it permanently breaks some characters, which are replaced by 0xEFBFBD (that issue does not occur when doing backup with IMAP or GMVault)

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