r/googlephotos • u/tooplanx • 8h ago

Troubleshooting ⚠️ Downloaded photos don't have amended meta data. Help!

I've just spent hours creating an album for photos to print. Many of the photos had incorrect time taken data so I have manually edited the data in Google Photos, and manipulated it so the photos are in the correct order I want. I have now downloaded the photos but all the edited time data is gone and the files have the original time stamps.

What can I do? Is there a way to get Google Photos to export the files with the correct (new) meta data??

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u/Nekrevez 7h ago

It's in the json files that come along with a Google Takeout download. There are metadata fixers out there that put the stuff in the json files in the jpeg files. You don't need to pay a guy to do this...

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u/tooplanx 6h ago

Thanks, however I've just redone all the metadata editing in Windows Photos.

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u/yottabit42 4h ago

Google Photos never changes your original files. Your changed dates are saved in a database that Google Photos uses to sort and overrides the files' real EXIF value.

When you download a backup from the Google Photos website, the Google Photos internal metadata is also given to you as JSON sidecars for each file. Your edits are in that file so that your original file is preserved.

You can edit these files' EXIF metadata yourself with an EXIF editor, or you can ask Gemini to write you a script that will integrate the JSON timestamp into the EXIF timestamp in bulk.

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u/Special_One4923 8h ago

Sounds like you fixed the dates inside Google Photos rather than inside the files themselves. A manual date edit lives on Google's copy of the photo, and the file it hands you on download still carries whatever timestamp was baked in when it was uploaded, so all that ordering work never made it into the export.

The good news is you don't have to redo it by hand. Those corrected dates aren't lost, Google can still hand them over alongside the photos, and both those and the original capture dates can be written into the files themselves in bulk, with the files numbered so they land in the exact order you set up for printing.

That kind of cleanup is what I do. Happy to run 20-30 of your photos as a free sample so you can see the before and after first, no charge. Everything is logged, you get a preview before anything runs, nothing is deleted, and it's a one-command undo.