Google Takeout Import
Every Google Photos export ships with the wrong dates and GPS buried in JSON sidecar files. FolioSort's Takeout Import reads those JSON files and writes real metadata back into EXIF — free — then exports your photos to a clean folder. Organizing the library into dated EXIF folders and advanced de-duplication unlock with Pro. All on your computer, nothing uploaded.
Ask Google for your photos and you get a ZIP where every image has lost its memory. The real capture
date is gone from the file — most photos read as "taken today," the day you exported. The
GPS is missing from the image too. Instead, both sit in a matching filename.jpg.json
sidecar that no photo app reads.
It gets worse. Every photo is exported once per album it belongs to, so a shot in three albums lands four times. Long filenames are truncated at 47 characters, and albums are mixed in with year folders. Most migration guides just say "upload your Takeout files" — and that is exactly how you end up with a library where nothing is dated right.
FolioSort's Takeout Import reads every .json sidecar, extracts the real capture
time and GPS, and writes them back into DateTimeOriginal, GPSLatitude and
GPSLongitude in EXIF. It matches truncated filenames to their sidecars automatically and
de-duplicates the album copies with SHA-256 content hashing.
Reading sidecars, restoring EXIF dates and GPS, and exporting to a clean folder are free. Auto-organizing the fixed library into dated EXIF folders and advanced de-duplication unlock with Pro. Everything runs on-device — no account, nothing uploaded, every file checksum-verified.
How it works
Unzip your Google Takeout export and point FolioSort at the folder — year folders, album folders and all.
FolioSort pairs every image with its .json sidecar, matching truncated filenames automatically.
The real capture date goes into DateTimeOriginal and GPS into the EXIF location tags — for free.
SHA-256 removes the album duplicates; Pro files everything into dated EXIF folders, checksum-verified.
What it does
.json sidecars for the real dateEvery Takeout image has a matching filename.jpg.json holding photoTakenTime.timestamp. FolioSort writes it into DateTimeOriginal — without it, every photo reads as "taken today."geoData, not the image. FolioSort writes them into the GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude and GPSAltitude tags so map views work again.Great_Summer_Holidays_Lisbon.jpg and its sidecar no longer line up by name. FolioSort matches them correctly, no manual work.{YYYY}/{MM} — so 2019 photos land in a 2019 folder, not today's. See the Organizer →Weighing this against the command-line route? FolioSort vs GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper lays both out honestly — including the cases where the free script is the better choice.
A raw Takeout export is three problems stacked on top of each other: wrong file dates, GPS stranded in JSON, and the same photo repeated across album folders with truncated names. Ignore them and they follow your photos into every app you migrate to next.
FolioSort resolves each one before a single file lands in your archive — the real date written into EXIF, GPS restored, duplicates collapsed to one, and every output checksum-verified.
Once the metadata is repaired, your library is fully portable. Correct EXIF means the timeline and map views work in Immich, Apple Photos / iCloud, Synology, Nextcloud or a plain folder on an external drive.
My Takeout export was 60,000 photos that all said "taken today" and the map was empty. FolioSort read the JSON files, put the real dates and locations back, and dropped the album duplicates. When I imported into Immich the timeline and the map just worked — for the first time.
Takeout Import is the repair step most guides skip. Get your photos out of Google, fix the metadata Takeout broke, then organize the clean library into the folders you actually want.
Bring your whole Google Photos library across to your own storage, on your own terms.
Explore Import →Read the JSON sidecars, restore EXIF dates and GPS, and de-duplicate the album copies.
This pageThe complete step-by-step walkthrough — the sidecar format, large libraries and every destination.
Read the guide →FAQ
Yes. Reading the JSON sidecars, writing the real capture date and GPS back into EXIF, and exporting your photos to a clean folder are free with no limit. Pro adds EXIF-based folder organization into dated folders and advanced de-duplication across album copies. Pro is a one-time €19.99, no subscription.
Google Takeout writes the real capture time into a JSON sidecar next to each image — photoTakenTime.timestamp — rather than into the file's EXIF. So most tools fall back to the file's modified date, which is the export date, and every photo appears as taken today. FolioSort reads the sidecar and writes the real date into DateTimeOriginal in EXIF.
In the JSON sidecar's geoData object, not in the image itself. FolioSort extracts the latitude, longitude and altitude and writes them into the GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude and GPSAltitude EXIF tags, so map views in Immich, Apple Photos and Lightroom work again.
Yes. Takeout exports each photo into a year folder and into every album it belongs to, so a photo in three albums appears four times. FolioSort uses SHA-256 content hashing to detect the copies and keep only one. Advanced de-duplication and EXIF-based folder organization are Pro features.
It's the small .json file Google exports next to each photo, holding the metadata it removed from the image — including photoTakenTime.timestamp (the precise capture time) and GPS latitude and longitude. FolioSort parses every sidecar and merges those values back into the matching photo's EXIF.
No. The entire Takeout Import runs 100% on your computer — no account, no upload of your library, ever. Every output file is checksum-verified with SHA-256 so nothing is silently corrupted on the way into your permanent archive.
JSON sidecar reading, EXIF date and GPS restoration, and export to a folder are free. FolioSort Pro adds EXIF-based folder organization and advanced de-duplication — all on-device, checksum-verified, never uploaded.