Moving images from Google to Apple Photos

[GuroSE]

Hi,

I hope someone can help me with a very annoying challenge: Today I moved thousands of photos from Google Photos to Apple Photos on my Mac. Some of the photos retained their original date, while most lost this data and ended up with today's date. Needless to say, it's chaos when there are photos taken over many years...

Any tips on how to ensure they are sorted by the correct date when transferring photos?

 

[RhetTbull]

Sounds like Photos didn't correctly read the date from the photos. It's possible the date wasn't stored in the photos by Google or that the date was stored in a field that Photos didn't read.

I'm the author of a free open source tool, OSXPhotos, that might be able to help.

If the time is in the photos but in a field that Photos didn't read, the following might work:

1. Installosxphotos
2. Install exiftool
3. Select one or more of the affected photos in the Photos app
4. In the Terminal, run `osxphotos timewarp --pull-exif`

This will look at every date/time field in the photo and try to find a date/time which will then be used to set the date/time in Photos

If this doesn't work, you might need to re-import the photos. When you download from Google, your photos should have been accompanied by a JSON file that contains some of the metadata. Photos app won't read this when importing but my tool will.

f you have a Google Takeout archive of your Google Photos library, you can import it using the following
steps:

• Download the Google Takout archive from Google Photos
• Unzip the archive
• Run the following command to import the photos into Photos:

osxphotos import /path/to/Takeout --walk --album "{filepath.parent.name}" --sidecar  --verbose --report
takeout_import.csv

This will import the photos, find the JSON sidecar and import the metadata from it and create a report in CSV format of the actions taken.

 

[GuroSE]

Thank you so much! This sounds a bit complicated for me, but I will try. Thanks again!