Takeout Mender: Rescue the metadata Google Takeout leaves behind.

Hey everyone! 👋

Takeout Mender started with a problem that I think is easy to overlook until it happens to your own photos.

When you export your library using Google Takeout, some of the information attached to your photos and videos can end up in separate JSON files. Move the media somewhere else, and suddenly the original dates, locations or descriptions might not come along as expected. If you're dealing with years of photos, fixing that manually is a pain.

So I built Takeout Mender to make that process easier.

It matches media files with their JSON sidecars and restores the metadata that's available. It supports embedding metadata into JPEG and PNG files, handling creation dates in supported MP4 and MOV files, and generating XMP sidecars for formats such as HEIC and WebP. You can also organise the recovered files into year/month folders.

The whole thing runs in your browser, so you don't have to upload your personal photo archive to a server. It creates recovered output without overwriting your originals, too.

I've tested it with sample exports, but I know there are plenty of real-world edge cases I haven't encountered yet. That's one reason I'm sharing it here.

If you've ever moved a Google Photos library, dealt with a Takeout export, or tried to preserve metadata across different photo apps, I'd genuinely like to hear what you think. What works, what doesn't, and what would you want this tool to handle next?

You can try it here: https://takeout-mender.pages.dev/

Thanks for taking a look! 🙂