How Do I Import Google Takeout Into digiKam?
digiKam reads EXIF, not Google's .json sidecars. Write the metadata into the photos before you build your digiKam library.
digiKam is excellent at reading metadata and completely uninterested in Google's .json files. It reads EXIF, IPTC and XMP, which are the real standards. Google's sidecar is Google's own invention and digiKam has no reason to know about it.
So if you point digiKam at a raw Takeout folder, it will build a library where most photos have no date and no location. The timeline view is useless, the map is empty, and the albums you spent years curating are just folders. Some people then start correcting dates inside digiKam by hand, which works but is a very long evening.
Write the metadata into the files first, and digiKam does the rest properly. The app pulls the capture date and GPS out of each sidecar and writes them into the photo as standard EXIF, which is exactly what digiKam expects to find. Import once and the timeline, the calendar view and the map all populate correctly. It can also write fresh sidecars in the format self-hosted tools understand, if you prefer that. The first 500 photos are free.