The Best Way to Change Photo Metadata: an Honest Comparison
exiftool, GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper, online fixers and this app, compared feature by feature. Including the two things this app does not do.
You have four realistic options for writing dates, times and GPS back into your photos. All four work. They suit very different people, and the honest differences are below.
| Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer | exiftool | GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper | Online fixers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works without a terminal on Mac, Windows and Linux | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Your photos never leave your computer | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Writes the date into the photo without a second tool | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Writes GPS from the sidecar into the photo | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Leaves your original export untouched | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Handles Google's truncated sidecar names | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lists the files it could not match | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Dry run before anything is written | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Converts HEIC to JPG | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Converts old AVI and WMV video to MP4 | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Renames and sorts into year and month folders | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Writes fresh sidecars for Immich and PhotoPrism | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Copies straight to a USB stick or Android phone | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free for unlimited photos | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Two of those crosses are ours, and they are the real trade. exiftool and GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper are free and open source, and this app is neither. If that matters more to you than anything else in the table, use them with a clear conscience. They are good software.
What the crosses actually mean
exiftool is the reference implementation and it can do almost anything, but you write the command. Google's sidecar names make that harder than the forum one-liners suggest: names are cut off at 46 characters, older and newer exports use different styles, and duplicates put the (1) in a different place. When your pattern misses, exiftool does not warn you. It leaves the photo alone and you find out months later. It also edits in place by default, so there is no untouched copy to go back to.
GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper is free, actively maintained and genuinely good at reorganising an export. Two things surprise people. It sets the file modification date rather than writing EXIF, and its own readme's final step is to run exiftool afterwards to put the dates inside your photos. And it moves your files by default rather than copying them, which the readme is upfront about: if something goes wrong mid-way, you re-export the zips. On Windows you double-click the .exe, but on a Mac or Linux you are in the terminal with chmod and xattr, and Apple Silicon needs Rosetta.
Online fixers are the easiest to start and the hardest to justify. Fixing your dates means uploading every family photo you own to a server belonging to someone you know nothing about. A 300 GB library is also not something you upload twice.
What this app does differently
It writes the date, the time and the GPS into the photo itself, in one pass, with no second tool and no command. It reads every sidecar naming style Google has used, including the truncated ones, and at the end it hands you a list of the files it could not match, so you know the state of your library instead of guessing. There is a dry run if you want to see the changes before any file is touched, and it writes into a new folder, so your original export is still there.
Then it keeps going where the others stop: HEIC to JPG, old video to MP4, renaming and folder templates, sidecars for Immich and PhotoPrism, and a direct copy to a USB stick or an Android phone.
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Everything runs on your own computer. There is no account, no upload and no sign-in, and with place names switched off it makes no network requests at all. The first 500 photos are free, which is enough to run it against exiftool or GPTH on the same folder and compare the results yourself. That is the honest way to use this table.