I exported all my Google photos with takeout recently. After around 70 hours I got a dump of 59 50GiB tgz files (format and size was my choice). I decided to have them sent to drive so I could sync them to a computer. It was a pretty pleasant experience, they even export metadata as json.

Unfortunately, at least in my experience with several different accounts, the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files. I try to infer, interpolate, and recover what I safely can during PhotoStructure imports of Takeout archives, but mostly it made me want to dig deeper into my storage closet to try to find the hard drives that had the actual, original files on them.

> the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files.

Are you talking about the inferred bit from other sources like phone location history? My experience may have been different because I paid Google for extra storage so that I could store the original versions of all my photos (For those that don't use Google Photos, Google offers "unlimited" lossily compressed photo storage but counts original quality photos against your drive quota.)

The json data is what they display in the UI, not a verbatim copy of the metadata, but the photos have the original metadata embedded in them.

At least for my Google Pixel, my "original quality" files from Takeout do not match the SHA of the original files pulled from the device. They kept the pixels, but they mucked with the EXIF headers.

I'm happy if your files weren't put through a blender!

> The iOS app needs photos access

Unfortunately that’s partly Apple to blame, as for the longest time it was an all or nothing permission, no option for write only access.