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Google Takeout Photos Recover Metadata

This parses all files - images and videos - and add the metadata present in the json side car files.

Motivation

My mom told me that her google account was full. Because it's my mom I had to jump in.

Google offers 15Gb of data and almost all of that space was occupied by photos and videos. I searched online for how to back up those in order to delete from Google's cloud. I came across Google Takeout, a tool to export all sort of data from Google. I just wanted photos so I went for Google Photos only. When the export was done I downloaded and got confused - why do I have json files here? Started searching online and I started to understand what they are.

I started my search for a tool that would write the metadata to those files. Interestingly enough I could not find one that suited my needs. Some tools do not support some type of files, like .gif or .mp4. Others would only write date and time information without supporting GPS information. Others were written in weird languages like JavaScript :D. Basically I was expecting to find a nice tool written in Python that would do the job. Because I could not find one here is my attempt.

Installation

I developed this tool on a MacOS. It should be identical for other platforms.

Requirements

You will need Python3 installed.

The following packages are required as this tool depends on them:

brew install exiftool
brew install libmagic

After having the above packages installed I recommend using a python virtual environment to run this tool. For that do the following:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the tool

For running this tool you will need to provide the folder containing all the exported photos from Google Takeout.

Unzip all files. If you have more than one file you have to copy all folders - the ones ending with 0001, 002, etc. to the main takeout folder and provide it as input to the tool.

python main.py takeout recovered

The above command will run the tool and write the photos and videos with EXIF metadata into recovered folder.

Important Note

Always back up your photos and videos beforing running this tool. I am not responsible for any damage it might cause to you.

Supported file types

Right now this tool supports the following file types:

  • jpeg
  • heic
  • tiff
  • png
  • webp
  • gif
  • mp4

Supported EXIF Tags

The tool writes date and time information, GPS information and title and description information. The tags used are:

  • DateTime
  • DateTimeOriginal
  • DateTimeDigitized
  • GPSVersionID
  • GPSLatitudeRef
  • GPSLatitude
  • GPSLongitudeRef
  • GPSLongitude
  • GPSAltitudeRef
  • GPSAltitude
  • Caption
  • Description
  • ImageDescription
  • Title
  • ObjectDescription
  • PreservedFileName

Known limitations

This tool does not consider edited files. I know there are some filenames that have the -edited suffix but do not contain an associated json side car. In my case none of my files have the -edited suffix so I did not add support for it because I could not test it. If you want to add support for that feel free to open a PR.