![]() Problem 3 (Deleting photos from Google Drive) I tried doing a name search using the JSON files but couldn’t find the matching photos either. Out of about 20000 photos and videos, on later searching I only found about 100 JSON files meaning 100 JSON files which weren’t deleted and hence about 100 photos and videos whose metadata wasn’t corrected. I would have been happy even if it did a 90% accurate job, but it did a 99% accurate job. I was afraid I might ruin my photos so what I did was I again downloaded my takeout (33GB) and safely kept it in case something went wrong. This took a day or two to get it right but finally after some edits and some test runs it worked. ![]() So I started stripping and editing the script to my needs. I only wanted to write the metadata back into the photos where they were without copying or moving them and finally delete the JSON file if done successfully. ![]() It looks for JSON files if not found, removed duplicates and also (this is something I hadn’t even anticipated) edits the metadata in the video files. The script does a lot more than I had planned for myself. So I decided to edit the script for my own need. What I wanted was that script should edit the photo where it was without creating a copy and if done successfully delete the JSON file. This also spoilt the folder organization that was already present. Anyway, I run the script and it works well, but problem was that the script copied the photos which get done properly to a new place and don’t do anything to the original. Some were missing, some had wrong names, some had wrong extensions etc etc. Going through the script I realized that the JSON files have been stored in a lot more fucked up manner than I realized. Fortunately that I found a pre built python script on Github ( ) which did this very thing and so I tried it. I thought this is a big problem and surely others have solved it so I got looking. I started to write the script but realised this is going to a lot more complicated than I realised. So now I had to write another python script to read the data from the JSON file for each photo and then edit the photo metadata with the correct data. This metadata on the photos will be invaluable. This metadata was very important for me if I wanted to sort these photos in my own way later on or use some other local photo organiser. So photo_229.jpg will have a photo_229.json file which will have all the real metadata while the photo has the created date of the time you created the takeout export. All information like created-time and latitude-longitude etc are not part of the photo anymore but exported as a JSON file along with the photo. Due to whatever way they work, Google Photos strips your photos off all their Metadata and stores it separately. So I wrote a python script to find these and eliminate these. The photos had the same name but post fixed with (1). Once I started browsing the pics I saw multiple photos had duplicates. So I had to spend time organising such that all “Photos from 2016” folders are merged. And since the export size was only 2GB, folders like “Photos from 2016” were distributed over multiple folders among that 16 unzipped folders. The way they had organised the photos in the export was that they created a new folder for each album you had and then a folder like “Photos from 2016” for photos from each year you’ve used the service. I ended with with 16 folders of photos (33GB/2GB) exports. That also took some time since unzipping 2GB on a hdd is kinda slow. Since my Mac has limited space I had to store it on my external HDD. Downloading all of the 2GB zip files took some time. The first thing I did was to create a takeout of 2GBs each. Overall it wasn’t a very good experience to stop using it. I had been using the service since 2015 and had 33 GB of photos on there. This is my experience of leaving Google Photos. Google Photos stopped providing unlimited storage June this year, and even though I am currently paying for Google Drive 100GB tier, I wanted to stop after I heard one too many reports of Google accounts being banned. The painful experience of leaving Google Photos
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