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What is this for?

If you ever want to move from Google Photos to other platform/solution, your fastest choice to export all photos is Google Takeout

But when you download it, you will find yourself with hundreds of little folders with few photos and weird .json files inside. What if you want to just have one folder with all photos, in chronological order? Good luck coping all of that :confused:

This script does just that - it organizes and cleans up your Takeout for you :+1:

It will take all of your photos from those tiny folders, set their exif and last modified, and other properties correctly, and put it in one big folder (or folders divided by a month)

How to use

  1. Get all your photos in Google Takeout (select only Google Photos)
  2. pip install -U google-photos-takeout-helper
  3. Extract all contents from your Google Takeout to one folder
  4. Run google-photos-takeout-helper -i [INPUT TAKEOUT FOLDER] -o [OUTPUT FOLDER]

If you want your photos to be divided by a year and month, run it with --divide-to-dates flag.

How to use for dummies

This script is written in Python - but if you have Windows, and don't want to bother installing it, you can download a standalone .exe :tada:

  1. Go to releases->latest release->assets and download takeout-helper.exe

  2. Prepare your Takeout:

If your Takeout was divided into multiple .zips, you will need to extract them, and move their contents into one folder

  1. Open cmd, and type:
cd C:\Folder\Where\You\Downloaded\takeout-helper
takeout-helper.exe -i [C:\INPUT\TAKEOUT\FOLDER] -o [C:\OUTPUT\FOLDER]

// Ps note: Don't use the "[ ]" in the command above.

But, be aware if you move your photos on you Android phone

Beware, that (99% of the times), if you move some files in Android, their creation and modification time is re-seted to current.

"Simple Gallery" app usually keeps original file creation time when moving and coping (but I don't guarantee it). It's also pretty cool and you can check it out: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Gallery

What to do when you got rid of Google Photos? What are the alternatives?

  • I really recommend you using Syncthing for syncing your photos and files across devices. It does so through your local WiFi, so you're not dependend on any service or internet connection. It will also keep original file creation date and metadata, so it resolves Android issue that I mentioned before.

  • If you want something more centralized but also self-hosted, Nextcloud is a nice choice, but it's approach to photos is still not perfect. (And you need to set up your own server)

  • Guys at Photoprism are working on full Google Photos alternative, with search and AI tagging etc, but it's stil work in progress. (I will edit this when they are done, but can't promise :P )

Google has changed folder structure

Around december 2020, Google stopped putting photos in thousands of "yyyy-mm-dd" folders, and started putting them in tens of "Photos form yyyy" folders instead šŸ™„

  • If you have new "year folders" (that is, few folders named like "Photos from 2012") (+albums) - use the newest version
    • pip install -U google-photos-takeout-helper
  • If you have old "date folders" (that is, ton of folders named like "2012-06-23") - use version 1.2.0
    • pip install -U google-photos-takeout-helper==1.2.0 Old version is... well, old, and I recommend you to just request the takeout again and run agains newest version of script :+1:

Other Takeout projects

I used this tool to export my notes to markdown - you can then edit them with any markdown editor you like :)

https://github.com/vHanda/google-keep-exporter

This one saves them in format ready for Evernote/ClintaNotes:

https://github.com/HardFork/KeepToText

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