Why Are My Photos in Folders Named by Year?
Google organises your export into Photos from 2015, Photos from 2016 and so on. Here is what those folders mean and how to build a better structure.
Those folders are Google's own filing system, and they are more trustworthy than the files inside them.
Photos from 2015 means Google's database says those photos were taken in 2015. That is the same information sitting in each .json sidecar. So the folder names are correct even when every photo inside shows today's date, which is a strange thing to look at: the folder knows more than the file does.
It is a coarse structure, though. One folder per year, thousands of files in each, no months, and albums living in separate folders alongside. Most people want something finer, and anything you copy elsewhere loses the folder names as context anyway. Structure that lives only in a folder name is fragile. Structure that lives inside the photo travels with it.
The app fixes both halves. It writes each photo's real capture date and GPS into the file itself, then optionally rebuilds your folders as year and month, or by location, using naming templates you control. You end up with a library that sorts correctly in any app, on any computer, and does not depend on Google's folder names surviving the next copy. The first 500 photos are free.