![]() Ideally, they'd give us a GUI tool for our computers, or just give us the option in takeout to get a different "cut" of the data. Unfortunately for us lay-people, we need to do quite a bit of scripting to make that useful. Playing devil's advocate for a minute: One could argue that Google's takeout method is actually "better" as it gives you the originals, as well as the whole history of edits to metadata in a way that can be programmatically interpreted. I find I need to run several passes with various settings to catch them all, but it beats doing it by hand. It ain't free at $9.99, but it has saved me WEEKS of mind-numbing error-prone work, so totally worth it. You can dial up or dial-down the matching sensitivity. It basically looks at the photos based on a histogram or bitmap to compare similarity and is pretty darn accurate. It can go through folders on your hard drive or even your Apple Photos library and de-dupe regardless of filenames/metadata differences. I found an AWESOME app in the Mac Appstore. :) I may go camp out at my friend's house to use his symmetrical gigabit fiber. Of course now I need to sit there and wait for like 2 weeks while my crappy 35mbps upload speed loads images to iCloud. It will be easy to filter those out because the dupes have a common naming convention. Bonus for me, I have a bunch of duplicate photos from 2013-2001 that were created by Picassa back in the day.This quickly isolates all of the "Live Photo" movies that Google stripped out of the originals and lets me kill those (I don't care to keep them). I wrote a finder "smart folder" to filter out any ".mov" files that are under 10mb and have a duration less than 4 seconds. Yes it is time consuming on the front-end, but it saves me lots of backend processing. You can then download the albums one by one.Once you have the whole year selected make an album.For me about 4 flicks of my mouse scroll wheel was a good rule of thumb for how many I can shift-select at a time. just scroll back up till it lets you add to the selection then keep continuing. Keep doing this till you have the whole year selected. As you scroll down, every 300-500 pics or so, while holding down "shift" select the next bunch.Don't try to select the whole year at once, it won't let you. Then begin scrolling backwards through time towards the first day of that year. Find the last day of a year in Google Photos.Best of all, the file creation dates are adjusted based on the metadata so no having to mess with exiftool to try to parse the JSON files. Once I've created the album, I can download the whole album via the UI, and it creates a single zip with all the photos. I figured out that I can use a special technique to select all the photos from a single year and put them into an album. ![]() but you can't download more than 500 photos at a time.till I found the workaround: I decided to try to download my photos directly via the UI. ![]() You end up will a million little folders which makes it unwieldy to use with other services.Any photo you changed the metadata on (like the date) has this metadata in a Json file rather than the exif data modified.Any albums you have result in an album folder in the archive with a duplicate file of the original.resulting in massive archive sizes.Not only does the archive size get artificially blown up, but there are some other problems with takeout. I've used Google Takeout, but the resulting file structure is a mess. Lately, I've been trying to get a reliable backup of my Google Photos so I can move to iCloud or just plain have a decent offline backup.
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