Use Google Photos just as a nice place to look up or display/share some pics. Don't do backups through it (many people are actually saving everything there and THEN getting the stuff to their computers!), don't organize stuff there and then expect it to be able to get it back in a nice form or for the service not to be killed or changed significantly next year.
#Google photos takeout metadata android#
I do appreciate Google Photos (see my post history), I do use it quite a lot and it's pretty hard to replace (impossible if you want something that's smooth, does all the face/things/geolocation stuff, including the great new Android maps) but only as a DEAD-END destination. This is years' worth of effort to get these organized and labeled properly. I am getting ready to scan in old family photos and edit the metadata to store in Google Photos It has a web UI built specifically for browsing large photo and video libraries (including auto-transcoding of videos that mobile browsers can't render)
It periodically re-imports directories, so new files (via SyncThing or whatever) show up in your library You can tell it to copy new files into a single, de-duped directory It reads from the Google Takeout JSON files You still can use Google Photos, but your metadata won't be at their mercy anymore.Įither way you decide to go, r/PhotoStructure will handle both of these approaches automatically: All NAS manufacturers come with their own mobile phone sync apps, as well, so you've got a few choices to pick from on that front. Running SyncThing or Resilio Sync on your phones and home server mean you aren't fighting Google anymore. Rather than using Google Photos to back up your files, and then using Takeout (which continues to be frustrating, as Google strips a bunch of metadata from your files), I'd suggest a different approach: back up your original files.
If that's not possible, what are my options here for backing up and preserving my Google Photos elsewhere while preserving the "new" metadata? Is there any way to combine the JSON and the image file so that the metadata is preserved into the file itself? That way, I can just use Takeout for the copies, merge them, and then import them into Plex.
I really want to have a backup of this stuff. We've put in captions for the photos based on what was written on the back of some of these pictures going back almost 100 years.
#Google photos takeout metadata download#
Upon further review, I see that Google Photos only stores the adjusted metadata in a JSON file when you use Takeout to download them. After removing the duplicates, I loaded it into Plex as a library, but the dates of the photos are all wrong. I combined our photos into one album for the year 2003 and downloaded it as a test. In the interest of backing up, we'd like to create a copy of this and store it on our home server, preferably to view in Plex if possible. My wife and I have thousands of photos in our Google Photos, tagged and labeled and captioned and all that good stuff.