Does Google Takeout Give Me the Original Quality Photos?
Takeout returns whatever Google stored. If you used Storage saver, the compressed version is what you get back. Here is how to check.
Takeout gives you back exactly what Google has, which is not always what you uploaded.
If you backed up in Original quality, you get your original files, untouched. If you used Storage saver or the old High quality setting, Google re-compressed your photos when you uploaded them and threw the originals away. Takeout returns the compressed version, because that is the only version that exists. There is no way to recover the original from Google. This catches a lot of people who assumed Google was keeping a pristine copy.
You can check your setting in Google Photos under Settings, then Backup quality. To check a specific photo, look at its file size and dimensions in the export against what your camera produces.
Whatever quality you get, the dates come back separately in .json files rather than inside the images. The app writes them into your photos without re-encoding anything, so the picture data is untouched and only the metadata changes. That matters here: a tool that re-saves your images would compress them a second time. This one does not. The first 500 photos are free.