Google Takeout photos show the wrong date – here’s the fix

Why it happens

Google Photos keeps the date a photo was taken in its own database. Many files have no date inside them at all: screenshots, images received in messaging apps, scanned prints, many videos, and copies you edited in Google Photos. Takeout exports the file plus a JSON “sidecar” with fields like photoTakenTime, geoData and description.

Photo apps don’t read those JSON files. Without a date inside the file they use the file’s modified time – which is when you extracted the zip. That’s why everything lands on the same day.

The fix in four steps

1. Open Rollmend (it runs in your browser, offline).
2. Choose your extracted Takeout folder, or select all takeout-*.zip parts together.
3. Look at the report: how many files were matched to a JSON and where each date comes from.
4. Click Fix and export. Rollmend writes the date into each file (EXIF for photos, QuickTime time for videos) and sets the file time in the zip.

Which date is used?

If a photo already has a camera date inside, Rollmend keeps it by default (cameras are usually right). You can choose to replace it with Google’s date instead – useful if you corrected dates in Google Photos.

Time zones

Google stores times in UTC. Rollmend converts them to one time zone you choose (default: your computer’s) and also writes the UTC offset into the EXIF data. Photos taken in other time zones keep the correct moment in time, but the clock time is shown in your chosen zone.