Google Photos

Add your Google Photos library to your timeline.

How to get it

  1. Go to takeout.google.com.
  2. Under Create a new export, click Deselect all.
  3. Scroll down and check the box by Google Photos.
  4. Scroll all the way down and click Next step.
  5. For File type, we strongly recommend .zip because it imports much faster than .tgz.
  6. Increase the File size to 50 GB so you have fewer files to download. Timelinize can handle zip64 archives.
  7. Click Create export and wait for your download(s) to become available.

Expected format

Due to its large size, this export is usually split between multiple archive files. In that case, the archive filenames must remain unchanged because their names link each other as part of the same dataset. The filenames should look like takeout-20240516T230250Z-003.zip.

Google Photos exports are in a subfolder Takeout/Google Photos. There is no need to extract the .zip files. The archives as downloaded from Google Takeout can be imported directly. (If you downloaded .tgz, you will at least want to decompress them, if not extract them.)

If you do choose to extract your archives, they should be able to be extracted into the same destination folder.

Google Photos export apparently truncates filenames to 47 characters (or 46 for the .json file). Timelinize can handle this. The full filename should still be contained in the contents of the .json file, so that name is used when copying the file to your repository.

Exports can include multiple copies of a photo or video: the original and the edit. Timelinize will keep both with a relation linking the two.

Takeouts from the year 2015 and newer are supported.

What is imported

All picture and video files should be imported. Each file has a sidecar metadata file that is also incorporated into the timeline. As described above, it is imperative that you do not rename the archive files, because sometimes a photo and its metadata may be split into different archives, and Timelinize relies on the naming convention used by Google Takeout to correlate photo/video and metadata files across archives. As you import each archive file, Timelinize should gracefully combine them all into your timeline, linking each photo to its metadata.

Album information is basically preserved: photos/videos in the same folder will be added to the same album which is made according to the album metadata file.

Embedded photo and video metadata, if present, will be read and stored with the item as metadata in the database. This includes EXIF and XMP tags. Not all XMP formats are supported; some values are proprietary and vendor-specific.

Motion pictures / live photos from iPhone, Samsung, and Google phone cameras are supported.