Why Does Windows Explorer Show the Wrong Date for My Photos?
Explorer shows file dates, not photo dates, and Takeout photos have no photo date at all. Here is what the columns mean and how to fix them.
Explorer shows you several different dates and they mean different things.
Date modified and Date created belong to the file, not the picture. They record when the file arrived on your disk, which for a Takeout export is the day you downloaded it. Date taken is the real one, read from the EXIF block inside the image. You can add that column by right-clicking any column heading. If you do, you will probably find it empty for most of your export, and that is the actual problem: Google did not write a capture date into your photos. It put the date in the .json file beside each one instead.
So Explorer is not wrong. It is showing you the only dates that exist.
The fix writes the real date into both places at once, so the EXIF "Date taken" column fills in and the file dates match it. Then sorting by date works, the Photos app shows the right years, and copying to a NAS or a backup drive carries the dates along. Get it from the Microsoft Store or download it directly. It runs on your PC with nothing uploaded, and the first 500 photos are free.