gophix

A simple tool to merge Google Photos Takeout json metadata with the media files themselves. This works with both photos and videos.

This works with all the media formats compatible with Phil Harvey's ExifTool. If the format is not supported, gophix will write the metadata in a xmp sidecar file.

Features

• Merges media creation date, GPS coordinates, and description from json files with the media files
• Fixes media file extensions if necessary (for example png files with a jpg extension)
• Works with any media format (although some formats require a sidecar file)
• Cleans up the json files

Motivation

Before I built this, I looked for an existing tool that could do this, but I couldn't find one that satisfied all my needs. Some of the issues I had with existing tools were:

• They did not work with all the quirky json file names that Google Photos Takeout generates
• They were prioritizing the metadata from the media file itself over the metadata from the json file
• They were not merging the GPS metadata or the description from the json file with the media
• They did not work with videos

Usage

First, download your Google Photos Takeout archive and extract it. You should have a folder with the following structure:

Takeout/
  Google Photos/
    Photos of 2001/
      IMG_0001.jpg
      IMG_0001.json
      IMG_0002.jpg
      IMG_0002.json
    Photos of 2002/
      IMG_0003.jpg
      IMG_0003.json
      IMG_0004.jpg
      IMG_0004.json

gophix supports 2 operations: fix and clean-json.

fix

To fix the files and merge the metadata, run the following command:

gophix fix <path>

Where <path> is the path to the Takeout/Google Photos folder. For example:

gophix fix ~/Downloads/Takeout/Google\ Photos

Note the backslash before the space in the path. This is necessary because the shell interprets the space as a separator between arguments.

Optionally, you can save the output logs to a file:

gophix fix <path> | tee logs.txt

clean-json

To clean up the json files (potentially after running fix), run the following command:

gophix clean-json <path>

Build

go build -o gophix

To do

• Make it idempotent (right now it cannot find the associated json files after fixing file extensions)
  • Could be fixed by keeping state of the renamed files in an additional json file
• Release binaries
• Add timezone offset to the metadata
  • Could be computed using the GPS coordinates if present