Due to whatever way they work, Google Photos strips your photos off all their Metadata and stores it separately. So I wrote a python script to find these and eliminate these. The photos had the same name but post fixed with (1). Once I started browsing the pics I saw multiple photos had duplicates. So I had to spend time organising such that all “Photos from 2016” folders are merged. And since the export size was only 2GB, folders like “Photos from 2016” were distributed over multiple folders among that 16 unzipped folders. The way they had organised the photos in the export was that they created a new folder for each album you had and then a folder like “Photos from 2016” for photos from each year you’ve used the service. I ended with with 16 folders of photos (33GB/2GB) exports. That also took some time since unzipping 2GB on a hdd is kinda slow. Since my Mac has limited space I had to store it on my external HDD. Downloading all of the 2GB zip files took some time. The first thing I did was to create a takeout of 2GBs each. Overall it wasn’t a very good experience to stop using it. I had been using the service since 2015 and had 33 GB of photos on there. This is my experience of leaving Google Photos. Google Photos stopped providing unlimited storage June this year, and even though I am currently paying for Google Drive 100GB tier, I wanted to stop after I heard one too many reports of Google accounts being banned. The painful experience of leaving Google Photos

Remove duplicates from google photos