The dates aren’t lost. Google puts them in .json files next to your photos, and nothing on your Mac reads those. This puts them back where they belong — inside the photo.
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Finder and Apple Photos never read this file.
The export lands with the date it was downloaded.
When you download from Google Takeout you don’t get your original files back untouched. For any photo whose date you corrected inside Google Photos — and for screenshots, WhatsApp saves and scans that never had EXIF to begin with — the only copy of the real date is a separate .json sidecar.
Finder, Explorer, Apple Photos and Lightroom don’t read sidecars. So they fall back to the file’s creation date, which is the day you downloaded it. A decade of memories lands on one day, out of order.
IMG_20190714_110530_1.jpg
Created: today
Location: —
2019/07-July/
2019-07-14-1105_Paris.jpg
Created: 14 Jul 2019, 11:05
Location: Paris
If every photo came off a camera or a phone with location switched on, your EXIF is already fine and you don’t need any tool. Google does not strip metadata that was already in your files.
Here is what one real 2026 export looked like — a single 2 GB part, 991 photos and videos:
0.0 / 0.0 — Google’s “location unknown”Dates come back for essentially everything, because the app falls back from sidecar, to EXIF, to the file’s own timestamp. Locations only come back where a location existed. You can check your own export before installing anything:
exiftool -r -if 'not $DateTimeOriginal' -p '$FileName' /path/to/Takeout | wc -l
If that number is small next to your library, you’re fine and you can stop reading.
The 2024 rename. Sidecars became .supplemental-metadata.json. Tools matching on the old name find nothing and report success.
The 46-character truncation. Google cuts the whole sidecar filename short, so long Pixel filenames lose their suffix. Exact-name matching misses these silently.
Duplicates move the counter. IMG_6503(1).JPG pairs with IMG_6503.JPG.supplemental-metadata(1).json — the number jumps to the sidecar, not where you’d expect.
Split archives. A photo can land in -001.zip while its sidecar lands in -002.zip. Extract every part into one folder, or select them all at once.
What the .json files in Google Takeout actually are — and every other question people ask about Takeout exports, answered in one place.