What Is the Best Way to Export Google Photos?
A practical order of operations for exporting Google Photos, with the settings that avoid the usual failures.
Do it in this order and you avoid nearly every common failure.
Check your backup quality first, under Settings in Google Photos. If it says Storage saver, your originals are already gone and no export will bring them back. Request Photos only, not all fifty Google products, or you will be sorting mail and calendar data out of your archive. Choose a smaller archive size, 10 GB rather than 50 GB, so one failed part is a small loss. Deliver to Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox rather than your browser, which sidesteps download timeouts and the limited attempts. Then unzip every part into one folder, because a photo and its .json file often land in different parts.
Verify the count before you delete anything from Google. An export is not a backup until you have opened it.
Then comes the step nobody warns you about. Your photos arrive with no dates inside them, because Google put the dates in the .json files instead. Run the app over the unzipped folder and it writes the real capture date, time and GPS into every photo, then sorts them into year and month folders if you want. That is the point where the export becomes an actual photo library. The first 500 photos are free.