Best Tool to Fix Google Takeout Photo Dates and JSON Files (2026)

1. FolioSort — best overall Takeout fix on Mac and Windows · repair free; Pro €29.99 one-time
2. Metadata Fixer — best paid single-purpose fixer, also on Linux · $39 one-time
3. GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper — best command-line tool · free, open source
4. PhotoMove — best free option if you only use Windows · free; Pro $8.99
5. immich-go — best if the photos are going into Immich · free, open source
6. Pluto Photos — best if you want an organizer and editor that imports Takeout · free up to 500 photos; Pro $29
7. ExifTool — best if you want to write the command yourself · free, open source
8. PhotoPrism — best if you want a self-hosted web library · free community edition

Because Google keeps the capture time in the .json sidecar next to each photo, not in the photo. When you unzip the export, your computer stamps every file with the day you unzipped it, and any app that reads the file alone — Finder, Explorer, Apple Photos, Immich, a NAS — shows that day. That is why a Google Photos Takeout shows the wrong date on almost everything.

The fix is not to re-download. It is to merge the Google Takeout JSON files back into the photos: read each sidecar and write the real date into the photo's own EXIF field, DateTimeOriginal. Once the date is inside the file, every app reads it, with no sidecar needed.

What's in the .json files from Google Takeout?

Each photo and video gets a text file with the same name plus .json, such as IMG_4567.jpg.json:

The capture time, the GPS, your caption, whether you hearted it, and the people you tagged. No photo app reads these files by itself; a Takeout fixer reads them and puts the values back into the photos.

Why are file names cut off, and what are the "-edited" copies?

Google truncates long file names at 47 characters, so a photo and its sidecar no longer match letter for letter. Photos you edited in Google Photos come out twice — the original and a -edited copy, which sometimes has no sidecar of its own. A good fixer matches both cases automatically.

Why do I have fewer photos after fixing the Takeout?

Takeout writes each photo once in its year folder and again in every album it belongs to: a photo in three albums is exported four times. When those copies are recognised as one photo, the count drops. That is the export being inflated, not files going missing. Also, large exports are split into numbered zips and a sidecar is not always in the same part as its photo, so unzip every part into one folder first.

1. Request and download your Google Takeout. At takeout.google.com choose Deselect all, tick only Google Photos, pick .zip and 50 GB parts, and download every part when Google e-mails you.
2. Unzip every part into one folder. Extract all the takeout-00N.zip files into the same folder, so each photo can find its .json sidecar even when Google put them in different parts.
3. Point FolioSort at the folder and press Scan. In FolioSort choose Google Photos in the sidebar, select the Takeout folder and press Scan. It pairs every photo with its sidecar and shows how many are Matched and how many are Orphans, with a reason for each, before anything is written.
4. Choose a destination and a folder template. Pick a destination, ideally on another drive, and a folder structure: Year / Month is free; Camera, day and custom templates are Pro. The preview shows the real folder tree first.
5. Choose Copy and press Process. Copy leaves the Takeout untouched. FolioSort writes the capture date, GPS, favourites, tagged people and captions into each photo, keeps one copy of each album duplicate, checksum-verifies every file and records the run as one undoable batch.
6. Optional: turn on Takeout Auto-Sync. If Google exports on a schedule, point Takeout Auto-Sync at the folder the deliveries land in; it merges only new photos into the same library. The always-on watcher is Elite; the Scan Now button is free.

The full walkthrough, including multi-account exports and very large libraries, is in the Google Photos Takeout guide, and every field the import reads and writes is listed in the Takeout help page. Taking the library somewhere specific? There are guides for a Mac, a Windows PC, a Synology NAS and Immich, and the rest are on the migration hub.

Before the repair: yes, every one of them. For most photos the sidecar is the only place the real date, GPS, favourite flag, tagged names and caption still exist. Delete them first and that information is gone for good.

After the repair: your new library does not need them. Once a tool has written those values into the photos, the date and location travel with each file to any app, drive or NAS. Keep the original Takeout zips until you have checked the result — look at the Matched and Orphans counts, open a few photos from different years — and treat that export as the negative. After that, the .json files have done their job.

We started from the tools ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google recommend for "Google Takeout dates wrong, json files everywhere", and checked each on its vendor's own site, documentation or official GitHub repository on 23 September 2026. The columns are what a Takeout export loses — date, GPS, favourites, people, captions — plus what happens to the photos afterwards. Where a vendor does not say, the table says so.

Two tools that still get recommended but are no longer maintained. The google-photos-takeout-date-fixer repository by laurentlbm, which still ranks on Google, is archived; its last change was on 28 December 2020. And the original GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper repository has had no release since September 2023 — if you use GPTH, use the Xentraxx fork.