How Do I Find Photos From a Certain Year?
Searching by year only works when the photos carry a date. Here is how to get there.
Every photo app can filter by year, and every file manager can sort by date. Both read the capture date inside the file. When that is missing, the filter finds nothing and the sort is meaningless.
After a Google Takeout export, the date is missing from every photo, so searching by year returns either everything or nothing depending on the app. The information is not gone, it is in the .json files.
Once the dates are written back in, searching works everywhere without any special software. Year/Month folders make it work even in a plain file manager. Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer does both in one run.