Google Takeout cleanup
Fix your Google Takeout. Dates back, duplicates gone, sorted by year.
You have a row of takeout-*.zip files and every photo inside says it was taken today. Upload the zips as they are. We put the real dates and locations back into each photo, drop the copies Takeout made for your albums, and hand you one tidy zip per year to keep wherever you like: an external drive, a NAS, Amazon Photos, iCloud. Nothing to install, no terminal, no second copy of your library eating your disk.
The result
What comes back
A short list of zips, one per year: photobridge-2015.zip, photobridge-2016.zip and so on, with a year bigger than 20 GB split into numbered parts, and photobridge-unsorted.zip for the handful of files that genuinely carry no date. Inside, every photo sits in a 2015/03/Photos or 2015/03/Videos folder with its capture date and location written into the file itself, so it sorts correctly in Finder, Explorer, Amazon Photos, Apple Photos, Synology Photos or anything else. Unpack the zips into one folder and your library is in date order.
Alongside the zips you get a per-file report: every photo, the date we found, where it came from (sidecar or the photo's own EXIF), its size and its path, plus a count of the duplicates we skipped and a spot-check of random photos you can open to see the dates for yourself before you download anything.
How it works
Three steps, none of them hard
| Step | You | Us |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Upload | Pick the takeout-*.zip files in your browser (several at once, up to 50 GB each). A closed lid pauses the upload; picking the same file again resumes it. | Store each part as it arrives, delete it once processed. |
| 2. Repair | Close the tab. We email you when it's done. | Unpack every part, match each photo to its sidecar through Google's truncated names, write the date and location into the EXIF, skip identical copies, build the report. |
| 3. Download | Open the report, download the year zips, unpack them where you want them. Press “Delete my download” when you're done, or wait 7 days. | Hold the zips encrypted for up to 7 days, then delete everything automatically. |
Already asked Google to deliver the export to OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive? Skip the upload: point PhotoBridge at the zips where they landed and choose the download as the destination. Same repair, same result.
The Takeout problems
What it puts right
| What Takeout did | What you get back |
|---|---|
| Capture dates moved into .json sidecars; photos show today's date | Dates written back into every photo's EXIF, from the sidecar or, failing that, the photo's own metadata |
| Locations and hand-corrected dates only in the sidecars | Written into the photo along with the date |
| Sidecar names truncated in ways that vary per file | Matched anyway; a photo without a sidecar falls back to its own EXIF date, and the report says which |
| One copy per album: the same photo three or four times | Identical copies detected by content and kept once |
| Dozens of zip parts in no useful order | One zip per year, year/month folders inside |
| Everything unpacked onto your own disk, twice | Nothing unpacked on your computer |
Versus doing it yourself
The honest comparison
There are free ways to do this and they work. If you enjoy a terminal and have the disk, take one. This page exists for everyone else.
| Route | Install | Disk needed | Price | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExifTool or GPTH forks (DIY scripts) | Yes, command line | 2 to 3× your library | Free | An evening to a weekend, more if a script trips on an edge case |
| Metadata Fixer (desktop app) | Yes | 2 to 3× your library | $39 once | Download, fix, then find somewhere to put the result |
| Proper Takeout (browser extension) | Yes, and it reads your Google session | 1× your library | €24.99 once | Skips Takeout; leans on an unofficial interface |
| PhotoBridge, download destination | No | Only the zips you already have | $19 once, up to 2 GB free | Upload, wait for the email, download |
Before you start
The honest limits
We hold a copy for up to 7 days. That is the one place PhotoBridge keeps your photos at all, and only so you can fetch them: encrypted at rest, reachable only through your account, deletable by you at any moment, gone automatically after a week. For every cloud destination we keep nothing.
Zip parts up to 50 GB each. That is Google's own maximum, so any export fits. For hundreds of gigabytes, uploading from home takes a while; letting Google deliver straight to OneDrive or Dropbox and pointing PhotoBridge there skips the upload entirely.
Shared albums aren't in your export, so they can't be in the result either. Save their photos to your own library in Google Photos and export again if you want them.
Edited copies are kept. Google exports a cropped or filtered photo as a second file; the two differ, so both come back. Duplicates we remove are identical copies only.
Questions people ask before they start
Why do all the photos in my Google Takeout say today's date?
Google Takeout writes each photo's real capture date into a separate .json sidecar instead of the photo itself, for anything it worked out after upload: screenshots, WhatsApp pictures, scans, and every date you corrected by hand. Your computer and most apps only read the photo, see no date, and show the day you unzipped. PhotoBridge reads every sidecar and writes the date back into the photo's EXIF, so it sorts correctly anywhere.
What are the .json files next to my photos, and do I need them?
They are the sidecars: capture date, location, description, favourite flag. Keep them until the dates are back in the photos. PhotoBridge merges the date and location for you, matching the odd truncated names Google produces (.supplemental-metadata.json cut short). When a sidecar is missing, which happens when it landed in a different zip part than its photo, we fall back to the date inside the photo itself, and the report tells you which source each date came from.
Do I have to install anything, or use a terminal?
No. Everything happens in the browser: you pick the zips, they upload in the background, we do the processing on our servers, and you download the result. There is nothing to install and no command line, which is the difference from GPTH and ExifTool.
How much free disk space do I need?
Only room for the zips you already have. Desktop fixers need the zips plus the unpacked copies plus the fixed copies, two to three times your library. PhotoBridge unpacks nothing on your computer, so a 200 GB export on a 512 GB laptop is fine.
What exactly do I get back?
One zip per year, named photobridge-2015.zip and so on (a year over 20 GB is split into numbered parts), plus photobridge-unsorted.zip for the few files that truly have no date. Inside each zip the photos sit in year/month folders, Photos and Videos apart, with the capture date in the file's metadata. A per-file report lists every photo, its date, size and where it went.
Does it remove the duplicates?
Yes. Takeout exports a photo once per album it is in, so a photo in three albums arrives four times. We detect identical copies by content and keep each photo once. The report shows how many duplicates were skipped.
How long do you keep my photos, and is it safe?
The zips wait for you for up to 7 days in encrypted storage, reachable only through your account, and you can delete them yourself the moment you have saved them. After 7 days they are deleted automatically. The working copies are deleted as each photo is processed. We never look at them. This is the only PhotoBridge destination where we hold a copy at all; for every cloud destination we keep nothing.
My export is 300 GB. Can I still use this?
Yes, two ways. Each zip can be up to 50 GB and you can upload many; a home connection manages roughly 20 GB an hour. For a very large export, ask Google to deliver it straight to OneDrive or Dropbox (Takeout offers that) or drop the zips in a synced folder, and point PhotoBridge at them there; the result is the same year-sorted download.
Can I put the result on an external hard drive, a NAS, Amazon Photos or iCloud?
That is what this is for. Unpack the year zips onto the drive or NAS, or point the Amazon Photos desktop app at the folder, or drag the folders into Photos.app for iCloud. Those destinations have no door that any cloud service can write to directly, so a clean download is the honest route.
What does it cost?
Up to 2 GB (about 500 photos) is free, so you can check the dates landed before paying anything. A one-time $19 Migration Pass covers the whole library, up to 2 TB, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. No subscription.
Not sure what you're looking at?
What is inside the zips, why the dates broke, and the free weekend route if you'd rather do it yourself.
Weighing the options?
Google's own transfer, the cloud services, browser exporters, DIY scripts and PhotoBridge, honestly compared.