[beeandapenguin]

Tangentially related, if you've ever had the pleasure of migrating away from Google Photos/Drive with Google Takeout, prepare to spend some time fixing photo metadata in your library and re-embedding exif data with exiftool. Takeout strips out the exif data into a non-standard JSON sidecar, as opposed to something more standard/well supported like XMP.

It's unfortunately hostile for non-technical users that care about their photo metadata, which I assume is most people since it includes data such as creation timestamps and location. It's not too bad to script this if you're savvy (and careful), but otherwise you'll have to pay for a third-party tool[1]

[1]: https://metadatafixer.com/

[gst]

> Tangentially related, if you've ever had the pleasure of migrating away from Google Photos/Drive with Google Takeout, prepare to spend some time fixing photo metadata in your library and re-embedding exif data with exiftool. Takeout strips out the exif data into a non-standard JSON sidecar, as opposed to something more standard/well supported like XMP.

I heard this claim before but I was never able to reproduce it. Does this only happen with the "Storage Saver" option enabled and/or when metadata has been manually changed? At least with the "Original Quality" option my takeout data seems to exactly match the files that were originally uploaded.

[kevincox]

Worse than that videos shared with you are reencoded to 1080p with crap bitrate. IIRC the JSON sidecar is also missing for these. Doesn't matter if you save them to your library. You can watch them in original quality and see all of the metadata on photos.google.com but they don't get taken out.