Takeout Photos Out of Order? Date Taken vs File Date
Why photos from a Google Takeout export sort in the wrong order in Finder, Explorer and phone galleries, and how to make every view agree.
You sorted the folder by date and got nonsense. Christmas 2016 sits between two photos from a 2021 hike. On your phone the same photos are in a different wrong order. In the photo app, a third order.
Every program is sorting correctly. They are just sorting by different dates, and after Takeout those dates disagree.
The three dates every photo has
A photo file carries up to three dates.
Date taken is inside the file, in the EXIF block, written by the camera. Its tag is DateTimeOriginal. Photo apps use this one.
Date modified is kept by the file system. It changes whenever the file is written. Unzipping sets it to the moment of the unzip. Copying often sets it again. File managers sort by this one by default.
Date created is also kept by the file system. On a Mac it is separate from modified; on Windows too. Linux file systems mostly do not track it. It usually becomes the copy time on every copy.
Camera photos have all three, and when they agree the sort order is the same everywhere. Takeout breaks the agreement. It sets modified and created to the download or unzip time on every file, and it leaves date taken missing on any photo that did not have it before upload. The real date sits in the .json sidecar, which nothing sorts by. See EXIF date taken versus file modified for the general case.
Why each view differs
Finder sorts by date modified, date created or date added. It shows no date taken column unless you add it, and on a Mac that column comes from Spotlight, which reads EXIF and reports it as "Content Created". A folder sorted by modified shows the unzip order, which is roughly alphabetical.
Explorer on Windows has a "Date taken" column that reads EXIF, and a "Date" column that shows date taken when present and date modified when not. Sorting by "Date" mixes the two: photos with EXIF go to their real position and the rest pile up on the unzip date.
Phone galleries sort by the media database's date taken, which the scanner fills from EXIF and falls back to file modified. Same mixed result.
Apple Photos, Immich, Synology Photos and the rest sort by EXIF and fall back to file dates. Same again.
So the pattern is always the same: photos with an EXIF date are in the right place, and everything else is bunched on one day. The fix is to give everything an EXIF date and set the file dates to match, so that every view agrees.
Sorting by date taken right now
If you only need to see the order and not fix it, you can make the file manager use the right column.
Finder: open the folder, choose View, then Show View Options, and tick "Content Created" or "Date Created". Sort by that. Content Created reads the EXIF date for files that have one.
Explorer: switch to Details view, right-click the column header, choose More, and tick "Date taken". Sort by it. Files without EXIF show blank and group at one end.
Neither helps photos that have no EXIF, which after Takeout is the group that matters.
Fixing the dates so every view agrees
Write photoTakenTime from each sidecar into the EXIF, and set the file modified and created dates to the same value. With exiftool:
exiftool -r -d %s -tagsfromfile "%d/%F.supplemental-metadata.json" \
"-DateTimeOriginal<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp" \
"-FileModifyDate<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp" "-FileCreateDate<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp" \
-ext jpg -ext heic -ext png -overwrite_original .FileCreateDate works on Mac and Windows; Linux ignores it. Videos need CreateDate and the other QuickTime tags instead of DateTimeOriginal. Photos whose sidecar names are truncated or carry a (1) counter need extra passes, described in the exiftool guide. If you already have EXIF dates and only the file dates are off, one line fixes a folder: exiftool "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" -r .
Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer does all three in one pass on macOS, Windows and Linux.
It writes the real date into EXIF for images and into the container for videos, then sets the file created and modified dates to the same instant. A photo taken on 14 July 2019 shows that date in Finder, in Explorer, on the phone and in every photo app. Photos with no sidecar keep their EXIF date if they have one, and otherwise keep the file date they had, so nothing ends up worse than it started.
If you also want the order to survive a plain alphabetical listing, pick the date-based naming template. A file called 2019-07-14-1105_Lisbon.jpg sorts by name into the right place on a TV, a car stereo, a digital frame, or anything else that ignores metadata. See renaming Google Photos files by date. The first 500 photos are free.
When the dates are right but the order is still wrong
Two things cause this. Time zones: EXIF has no zone, so a 23:30 photo in Tokyo and a 09:30 photo the same day in London can flip order depending on how they were written. And burst shots: several photos in one second sort arbitrarily among themselves. Neither is worth fixing for most people.
Frequently asked questions
Why do my old scans sort into 2021?
Because the scanner wrote 2021 into EXIF, which is when you scanned them. Google Photos let you set the real date, and that correction is in the sidecar's photoTakenTime. Merging the sidecar overrides the scanner's date. For scans without a sidecar, see setting date and place on scanned photos.
Does copying to a USB stick reset the dates again?
It can reset file modified and created dates, depending on the tool. It never touches EXIF. Once EXIF is correct, photo apps stay right even if a copy shuffles the file dates. See moving photos to a USB stick and keeping dates.
Which date should I trust when EXIF and the sidecar disagree?
The sidecar, usually. It reflects what Google Photos showed you, including your corrections. If you never edited dates in Google Photos they will agree anyway.
Can I sort by date taken on an Android phone's file manager?
Most file managers sort by modified date only. Fix the file dates to match EXIF and the file manager falls in line.