How Do I Move Google Photos to a Mac With the Correct Dates?
Apple Photos files every Takeout import under today. It reads EXIF, and Takeout photos have none. Here is the fix, in one run.
Import a raw Takeout export into Apple Photos and everything lands under today's date. Your Memories are empty, the Places map has no pins, and ten years of photos sit in a single block.
Apple Photos reads the EXIF capture date inside each file. It does not read Google's .json sidecars, and it never will. Takeout photos regularly have no EXIF date, because Google kept that information in its database rather than in your files. So Photos does the only thing it can and uses the import date.
The painful part is that fixing it afterwards is far harder than fixing it first. Once photos are in the Photos library, correcting dates means selecting them and adjusting by hand, or deleting the whole import and starting again.
Run the app over your Takeout folder before you import anything. It writes the real capture date, time and GPS into each photo, so Apple Photos reads them and builds your timeline correctly on the first pass. Memories work, the map fills in, and albums land in the right years. It is on the Mac App Store, it runs entirely on your Mac, and the first 500 photos are free.