How Do I Move Google Photos to OneDrive Without Losing the Dates?
Takeout can deliver straight to OneDrive, but the photos arrive without their dates. Here is the step most people miss.
Takeout can send your export directly to OneDrive, which saves you a download and a re-upload. Pick OneDrive as the delivery method when you create the export and the zips appear in your account. That part is genuinely easy.
The part that catches people is what is inside the zips. You still get photos with no capture date inside them and .json files holding the real dates separately. OneDrive reads EXIF, finds nothing, and sorts your library by upload date. Worse, if you unzip straight into OneDrive and let it sync, you have now scattered thousands of dateless photos across every device you own, and fixing them afterwards means re-syncing all of it.
Do it in this order and you only handle the files once. Download the zips, run the app over them on your computer, check a few photos, then upload the fixed folder to OneDrive. Every picture arrives with its real date and location already inside it, so OneDrive sorts your timeline correctly from the start. The first 500 photos are free, which is enough to prove the order works before you commit a whole library.