degoogle-photos 0.1.5

Organize Google Takeout photos into YYYY/MM/ folders with dedup and reporting

Degoogle-Photos

Unfuck the mess that Google Takeout makes of your photo library. Takes the dozens of chaotic zip archives, deduplicates, extracts dates, and organizes everything into clean YYYY/MM/ folders with album symlinks and a browsable HTML report.

Why this exists

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

Google Photos is free because Google's business model is advertising and data. Their terms of service grant them a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute anything you upload -- including training AI models and creating derivative works. Your "private" album is private from other users, not from Google.

I decided to leave Google Photos for good, but getting out is harder than getting in. Google Takeout -- the only official export tool -- dumps your collection into dozens of numbered zip files with a chaotic structure: albums split across chunks, JSON metadata sidecars with truncated filenames, duplicates scattered everywhere, and no usable date-based organization. For my ~20,000 photos across 46 archives, it was a mess.

The go-to recommendation is the Google Photos Takeout Helper. I tried it. It crashed on a missing geoDataExif field in a JSON sidecar. Moved the problem file out, restarted. Crashed again on the next file. Moved the whole album folder. Crashed on a different folder with the same error. Each crash meant starting from scratch -- no resume support. After several rounds of this whack-a-mole I gave up. With 20,000 files and wildly inconsistent metadata across 46 archives, a tool that dies on the first unexpected field is effectively unusable.

So I built this from scratch with Claude

Sharing it because leaving Google shouldn't require a computer science degree. If the only thing keeping you on Google Photos is "I don't know how to get my photos out," this is how.

What it does

• Scans multiple Takeout*/Google Photos/ directories and builds a global index
• Extracts the best date for each file (EXIF > JSON photoTakenTime > filename > JSON creationTime > file mtime)
• Deduplicates by MD5 hash + date (rounded to the minute)
• Copies media files into YYYY/MM/ folders, preserving JSON sidecars alongside
• Creates Albums/ folder with relative symlinks for named albums
• Generates a multi-page HTML report with thumbnails, metadata tooltips, and Finder links

Getting your photos out of Google

1. Go to takeout.google.com
2. Click Deselect all, then scroll down and select only Google Photos
3. Click Next step
4. Choose Export once, file type .zip, and size 2 GB (or 50 GB if you have fast internet and lots of storage)
5. Click Create export
6. Wait -- Google prepares the archive in the background and emails you when it's ready (can take hours or even days for large collections)
7. Download all the zip files and extract them into a single folder

You'll end up with something like Takeout/, Takeout-2/, Takeout-3/, ... each containing a Google Photos/ subfolder. That's your --source directory.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.9+
• A Google Takeout export (see above)

Installation

Windows:

pip install degoogle-photos

macOS / Linux:

pip3 install degoogle-photos

That's it. Pillow (for EXIF extraction) is installed automatically.

Why pip3? Many macOS and Linux systems still have Python 2.7 as the default pip. If you see "No matching distribution found" or warnings about Python 2.7, that's why. pip3 ensures you're using Python 3.

Alternative: run from source

git clone https://github.com/couzteau/Degoogle-Photos.git
cd Degoogle-Photos
pip3 install -e .

Usage

# Simplest: cd into the folder with your Takeout dirs and run
cd /path/to/takeouts
degoogle-photos

# Or specify paths explicitly
degoogle-photos --source /path/to/takeouts --output /path/to/organized

# Preview what would happen (no files copied)
degoogle-photos --dry-run

Options

Flag	Description
--source PATH	Root directory containing Takeout*/ folders (default: current directory)
--output PATH	Destination for organized photos (default: ./DeGoogled Photos)
--dry-run	Report what would be done without copying any files

How it works

1. Index -- Scan all Takeout directories, index media files and JSON sidecars by album
2. Match -- Link each media file to its JSON sidecar via title field or filename stripping
3. Date extraction -- Extract the best date using a priority cascade (EXIF > JSON > filename > mtime)
4. Deduplication -- Skip files with identical MD5 + date (within the same minute)
5. Copy -- Copy to YYYY/MM/filename with collision resolution (_2, _3, etc.)
6. Albums -- Create Albums/<name>/ with relative symlinks to the copied files
7. Report -- Generate a browsable HTML report with per-folder and per-album pages

HTML Report

The report is written to <output>/report/index.html and includes:

• Dashboard with copy/duplicate/error counts and date-source breakdown
• Per-folder pages with image thumbnails in a responsive grid
• Per-album pages for named albums (generic "Photos from YYYY" albums are excluded)
• Hover tooltips showing EXIF data (camera, ISO, focal length, GPS) and JSON metadata (people, geo, description)
• "Finder" buttons to open the containing folder in macOS Finder

Project structure

degoogle_photos/
  __init__.py          # Package version
  indexing.py          # Takeout directory scanning and JSON sidecar indexing
  dates.py             # Date extraction (EXIF, JSON, filename, mtime)
  metadata.py          # Rich metadata extraction for report tooltips
  dedup.py             # MD5 hashing and deduplication keys
  copy.py              # File copying with collision resolution
  report.py            # Multi-page HTML report generation
  logging_util.py      # Migration logging and progress reporting
  albums.py            # Album symlink creation
  cli.py               # CLI entry point and orchestration
tests/
  conftest.py          # Shared test fixtures
  test_indexing.py
  test_dates.py
  test_metadata.py
  test_dedup.py
  test_copy.py
  test_report.py
  test_albums.py
migrate_photos.py      # Thin wrapper for backward compatibility
pyproject.toml         # Project metadata and dependencies

Running tests

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -v

Where to put your photos after

Once your photos are organized, you have options with better privacy terms:

Service	Terms summary	Cross-platform
Apple iCloud	Minimal rights -- just enough to sync and store. No ad business model (you pay for storage via iCloud+).	Apple devices + web (non-Apple users can upload via browser to shared albums)
Adobe Lightroom	Rights limited to operating services. No generative AI training on customer content.	Full cross-platform
Dropbox / OneDrive	Rights limited to providing the service. No promotional or AI training use.	Full cross-platform
Self-hosted (Immich, PhotoPrism)	You retain all rights. Requires technical setup.	Web-based, any device
Local storage + backup	Your files, your rights. Use the generated report/index.html to browse and review. Back up to an external drive or NAS.	Any device with file access

License

MIT