Someone recommended the github project called Timeliner to help me get the photos though. I just haven’t tried it yet.

https://github.com/mholt/timeliner

  Timeliner is a personal data aggregation utility. 
  It collects all your digital things from pretty much 
  anywhere and stores them on your own computer, indexes
  them, and projects them onto a single, unified timeline.

  Supported data sources
  * Google Location History
  * Google Photos

However, it has tons of metadata files, empty folders, etc. I highly suggest unticking 'preserve directory structure' when unpacking.

Now, when I was just browsing the zips, it was folder after folder of junk I didn't even recognize, I guess metadata files of some sort. Rather than do all that, at least in Gnome, when I unzip it has an option of 'preserve directory structure' that I unchecked, which basically gets rid of all the folders. From there I was easily able to mass remove all the json and other non-photo files, leaving only the photos behind. Good luck.

This is because of a change they made.

I was absolutely distraught tbh. The feeling of being at the mercy of google is a horrible feeling. Especially when there is zero support or assistance.

I received links to over 100 tgz files (4GB each), and checked a couple. Each had JPG files and JSON files with extra metadata ("geoDataExif", "geoData" (inferred from my location history?), "title", "description", etc).

I can't tell if the actual images are the originals I uploaded, but I can confirm the images were archived as actual images, and in a serviceable format/structure.