Why Does Apple Photos Show the Wrong Date After Importing My Takeout?
Apple Photos reads EXIF and ignores Google's .json files, so everything lands under today. Here is the fix, and why order matters.
Apple Photos builds your timeline from the EXIF capture date inside each file. It does not read Google's .json sidecars and it has no setting to make it do so.
Takeout photos frequently have no EXIF date. Google kept that information in its own database and exported it separately, so the image file itself is blank. Apple Photos finds nothing, falls back on the import date, and files ten years of photos under today. Your Memories are empty, the Places map has no pins, and the Years and Months views are meaningless.
The awkward part is the order. Fixing this after import means selecting photos in the Photos app and adjusting dates by hand, or deleting the whole import and starting over. Neither is quick with forty thousand files.
Run the app over your Takeout folder before you import anything into Photos. It writes the real capture date, time and GPS into each file, so Apple Photos reads correct metadata on the first pass and builds the library properly. Memories work, the map fills in, and the timeline is right. It is on the Mac App Store, it runs entirely on your Mac, and the first 500 photos are free so you can test one album before committing.