What Is EXIF Data and Why Do My Photos Not Have It?
EXIF is the information stored inside a photo file. Here is what it holds and why Takeout photos are missing it.
EXIF is a small block of information stored inside the image file itself: when the photo was taken, which camera took it, the exposure settings, and often where you were standing.
Your camera writes it at the moment of capture. Plenty of files never get one. Screenshots have no EXIF date. Images saved from WhatsApp or a browser usually have it stripped. And anything you edited inside Google Photos lost it along the way. For those, Google still knew the right date, but it kept that in its own database rather than in your file, and exported it to a separate .json file instead.
That is the gap this app closes. It reads the date and location out of each .json and writes them into the photo as proper EXIF, so every app from Apple Photos to your phone's gallery reads them correctly. The first 500 photos are free, which is enough to see the difference on a folder you know.