Google Takeout Import
Every Google Photos export ships with the wrong dates — and with your GPS, your favourites, the names of the people you spent years tagging, and your captions all stranded in JSON files beside the photos. FolioSort's Takeout Import reads those sidecars and writes every bit of it back into the photo, free, then exports 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 and writes what it
finds back into the photo: the real capture time into DateTimeOriginal, the coordinates into
GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude — and the three things most tools throw away with the
sidecar. The photos you hearted come back as five-star ratings. The names of the
people in them — years of tagging faces in Google Photos — come back as keywords your next app can
search. Your captions come back as descriptions. It matches truncated filenames to their
sidecars automatically and de-duplicates the album copies with SHA-256 content hashing.
All of that is free — sidecars, dates, GPS, favourites, people, captions, and exporting to a clean folder. 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.
With Pro, SHA-256 removes the album duplicates and everything is filed 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.favorited: true in its sidecar and nothing in the file. FolioSort writes XMP:Rating=5, so your favourites survive as five-star photos your next app can filter on. A photo you never favourited is left alone — no rating is written, so stars you set elsewhere are never zeroed.XMP:Subject keyword, so a search for "Ana" still works in Lightroom, digiKam or Immich. Years of naming faces that every other Takeout tool throws away.EXIF:ImageDescription and XMP:Description rather than being dropped with the sidecar.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. Every Takeout tool side by side — Metadata Fixer, immich-go, PhotoMove, ExifTool: best tool to fix Google Takeout dates.
When the run finishes
The end of a Takeout rescue is the worst moment to be told nothing. You are standing in front of a folder you have never seen the inside of, holding the only copy of twenty years of photographs, about to decide whether it is safe to delete the export.
So the run ends with a report in two columns: what was recovered, and what is still loose in the archive you are now looking at.
Recovered — dates restored, GPS restored, favourites flagged, photos with names on them. Each number is counted as the file actually landed with its metadata written, not from the scan: a run that placed 1,000 of 10,000 files says 1,000. If ExifTool could not tag some files, that is shown as a caveat rather than quietly folded into the total.
Still loose — how many photos have no date at all, and how many of those still have one
hiding in the filename that Organize can recover. How many distinct people were found, with the three most
photographed named. And how many files whose extension lies about their contents, which Takeout produces
more of than you would expect: .CR2 and .CR3 files that are really JPEGs.
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 — and FolioSort itself can sort the repaired library into {Country}/{City} folders from those same coordinates.
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.
No. Repairing the Takeout metadata is the first module you use, not the only one: the same app then sorts the repaired photos into dated, named folders, merges the export with the copies already on your other drives, removes the duplicate album copies and the screenshots, and — on Elite — searches the whole library in plain language, by face, by text inside the photo or by automatic event, all on-device. FolioSort is the photo manager for the whole library. A second app is only needed for something FolioSort deliberately does not do: developing RAW files (Lightroom, Capture One) or serving the library to phones over the web (Immich, PhotoPrism). Because the output is plain folders and real EXIF, any of those can open it later without an import step.
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.