Google Takeout Photos Missing GPS Location? It’s in the JSON

You downloaded a photo from Google, checked its details, and the location is just... gone. That's normal, unfortunately: Google strips or separates location data when you download photos. For Takeout exports the GPS coordinates usually aren't lost at all; they're sitting in the JSON sidecar file's geoData field instead of inside the image.

Where your location data went

Google Photos keeps location information in its own database, not necessarily inside your files. Depending on your settings and how you export, the image files you download often come out with no GPS EXIF in them at all, which is why a Google Photos download with no GPS surprises so many people. So if your Google Takeout photos are missing location data, look next to each image: the JSON sidecar carries a geoData field with the latitude, longitude, and altitude Google had saved for that photo.

One honest caveat before you get your hopes up: if a photo's geoData reads 0.0 for both latitude and longitude, Google genuinely had no location saved for it. There's nothing to recover for those.

Why it matters before you leave Google

The map view in Apple Photos, Immich, Synology Photos, and most other photo apps reads GPS EXIF from inside the files. If the coordinates are stranded in Takeout's JSON, every app you move to will show your library with no places at all. Merge the geoData from the JSON back into the Takeout files once, and every app, now and in the future, can place your photos on a map.

How to write GPS back into the photos

The free, proven route is ExifTool, which can copy the coordinates from each sidecar into its matching image using -tagsfromfile and the GeoData tags:

exiftool -r -tagsfromfile "%d/%F.json" "-GPSLatitude<GeoDataLatitude" "-GPSLatitudeRef<GeoDataLatitude" "-GPSLongitude<GeoDataLongitude" "-GPSLongitudeRef<GeoDataLongitude" --ext json C:\Takeout

The Ref lines aren't a typo: ExifTool derives the N/S and E/W reference from the sign of the coordinate, so pointing both tags at the same value works. The real catch is the file matching. This command assumes every sidecar is named exactly image.jpg.json, and Takeout frequently isn't that tidy: sidecars named .supplemental-metadata.json, truncated filenames, and "(1)" duplicate variants all slip through naive name matching. Our guide to Google Takeout's JSON files covers those naming quirks in detail.

If you'd rather not script around the edge cases, Google Photos Takeout Helper (GPTH), a free open-source tool, handles location merging as part of its Takeout processing. And it's the same problem we're building PhotoDate for: merging dates, GPS, and descriptions from the JSON back into your photos in the browser, with nothing uploaded anywhere. Early access is free.

Check it worked

Pick a photo you know had a location and check it after fixing. On Windows, right-click it and look at Properties → Details for the GPS fields; on a Mac, use Get Info or Preview's inspector; or drop the file on any EXIF viewer and confirm the GPS latitude and longitude are filled in. Then import a few fixed photos into your new photo app and confirm the map view actually places them where you expect. If the map is right, the merge worked.

Frequently asked questions