Hi friends,
In this video, let's use "Google Takeout" to download all of our Google photos and resolve issues associated with the metadata of the downloaded file. Like an incorrect creation date. which makes it very difficult to find our favorite photos from a given date on our PC. Let's fix it using the JSON file downloaded with the photo.
After logging in to the URL takeout.google.com, we can download all our personal data stored on several Google services such as Google Chrome, Google Drive, Google Contacts, Google Keep, Google Play, Google Home, Hangouts, Gmail. , YouTube and so on…
But, for now, “Let's Deselect All” and choose Google Photos… Multiple Google Photos data formats would be downloaded, such as photos, videos and their metadata, we can also choose to download specific albums if necessary.
By clicking “next” at the bottom of the page, we can choose delivery methods such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. But let's choose "send download link by email", remember that once we receive the email, we will only have one week time to download these extracted files.
We can now choose the frequency, type and size of the file. To reduce the number of files to download, I choose 10 GB as the file size.
By clicking "create export", a copy of our Google Photos would be created and a download link sent to our email, usually within a few hours, or sometimes even a few days, depending on the size of our data.
Upon receipt of the email from Google, we would have 7 days to download the exported files. These files are compressed and divided according to the chosen size.
Now let's download all these zip files and extract our media files from them.
Open the extracted folder and refer to “archive_browser.html” to identify any export issues with the files.
Now here comes our main problem, the creation date of the uploaded media file is incorrectly updated with the upload date, due to this incorrect date it would become very difficult to find our favorite photo or video from a date well known, however the actual metadata of the file is stored in the downloaded JSON file alongside this media file.
Now let's start fixing metadata of downloaded media files absolutely free.
This Metadata Fixer application uses Phil Harvey's free and open source ExifTool software, it goes through each media file and its corresponding JSON file and merges them to update the metadata.
So let's try to use the same technique.
Go to the exiftool.org URL and download the Windows executable.
Rename it to exiftool.exe and copy the exe to the C://Windows folder.
Just for comparison, I take a copy of this folder and rename it to old. The 4 commands that we are going to use would be available in the description of this video.
Now from the command prompt navigate to the parent folder of the actual photos folder.
Get the name of any file and run this command with the folder name followed by the file name.
It should display all existing metadata of the file, including the date the file was created.
In the same command, type dot(.) JSON next to the file name to view all metadata tags available in the JSON file. As we can see, the PhotoTakenTime tag has the correct value which can be used to update the file creation date.
Finally, to update the metadata of our media file, consider running this command on the parent directory and passing the child directory as a parameter at the end.
The FilecreatedDate metadata of the media file would be replaced by the PhotoTakenTimeStamp metadata tag of the JSON file. Remember that we need to use PhotoTakenTimeStamp instead of PhotoTakenTimeFormatted.
Besides the json files, all other files in this child folder need to be updated.
So let's run the command, wow… it successfully updated all 13 images in the folder in less than a second.
Please take the opportunity to connect and share this video with your friends and family if you find it useful.
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