Is There an Alternative to GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper?
GPTH is free and good at what it does, but it moves your files and hands you off to exiftool for the EXIF step. Here is a desktop alternative.
GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper is a good project and it has rescued a lot of libraries. It is free, it is open, and if it works for you there is no reason to change.
The reasons people look for something else are usually the same three. On Windows you can double-click the .exe, but on a Mac or Linux you are in the terminal running chmod, xattr and ./gpth, and on Apple Silicon the readme asks you to install Rosetta first. It moves your files by default rather than copying them, so as its own readme puts it, if anything goes wrong mid-way you re-export the zips again. And it sets the file modification date rather than writing EXIF; the readme's own last step is to run exiftool afterwards to put the dates inside your photos.
This is the same job in an app you install and open, on all three platforms. No terminal, no Rosetta, no chmod. It reads both sidecar naming styles, the names Google truncates at 46 characters, and the (1) counters on duplicates, then writes the capture date, time and GPS into each photo. At the end it shows you exactly which files had no usable data, so you can deal with those and ignore the rest. It copies into a new folder, so your original export is still there if you change your mind. It runs offline on Mac, Windows and Linux, and the first 500 photos are free, so you can run both and compare.