[citelao]

I'm not chaxor, but as far as I remember I think you're right:

If I had unzipped all the takeout directories into one giant folder, there'd be no conflicts.

Since I didn't do that, I had to do weird multi-pass parsing, since an album could be split across multiple ZIPs. I get a bit neurotic around backups like this, so I'd have loved some sort of virtualized filesystem that non-destructively represented all of those zips "merged together." But in retrospect, I should have just merged the directories into one folder---would have made parsing easier :)

I don't recall substantial problems with duplicates. Just weird renames and EXIF data mismatches. And since I was trying to archive my data, I definitely didn't want similar photos to be deduplicated.

My problems are probably different than chaxor's, though.