What Is the Easiest Way to Fix Google Takeout Metadata?
Scripts, exiftool commands and web uploaders all work in theory. Here is an honest comparison and the option that needs no command line.
The easiest way is a desktop app: choose your Takeout folder, choose an output folder and press start, with no command to write. If you are comfortable in a terminal, exiftool is free and does the same job. There are four common routes, and they suit different people.
exiftool is the reference tool and it is free. If you are comfortable in a terminal it will do everything, but you have to write the command yourself and handle Google's awkward sidecar names, which get truncated at 46 characters and use two different naming styles. A pattern that misses those skips files silently, which is the worst kind of failure. Python scripts such as GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper wrap that logic for you, and they are good, but they need Python installed and they break when Google changes the export format. Web uploaders ask you to send your whole library to a stranger's server. A desktop app does the same work with a window and a progress bar.
If you already live in a terminal, use exiftool and keep your money. If you do not, this is the easy fix: choose your Takeout folder, choose an output folder, press start. It handles both sidecar naming styles, the truncated names and the duplicate counters, writes date, time and GPS, and lists at the end anything it could not match so you are never guessing. It runs offline, and the first 500 photos are free, which is enough to compare it against anything else on this list.