Year folders and album folders
The original GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper recognizes a year folder with the pattern Photos from followed by a year from 1800 to 2099. GPTH_Neo widens the prefix to Fotos del, Fotos von, Foto da and Foto_s van; FixMyTakeout accepts those plus Fotos de and Photos de. Everything else at that level is an album folder, named as you named the album, including spaces and punctuation.
An album folder holds the album's own description file, metadata.json in an English-language account and métadonnées.json, Metadaten.json, metadati.json and so on in others. Its shape has changed over the years: old exports wrap everything in albumData, later ones put title, access, date and geoData at the top level, and 2025 exports can be as small as {"title": "basement finishing"}, sometimes with an enrichments list of narrative text and named locations and a sharedAlbumComments list. Because it has no photoTakenTime, FixMyTakeout knows it is not a photo's JSON and skips it, whatever it is called.
One photo, several copies
| Copy | Folder | Reported in |
|---|---|---|
130917ad28385b5a-photo.jpg | Photos from 2022 | immich-go issue #380 |
130917ad28385b5a-photo.jpg | Amsterdam 2022 | immich-go issue #380 |
130917ad28385b5a-photo.jpg | 1 anno fa (Italian for "one year ago") | immich-go issue #380 |
The same export shows how the copies are spread across zip parts: that photo's JSON was in part 003 and the photo in part 004, and the album's metadata.json turned up in both part 001 and part 009. So an album folder is not even guaranteed to be whole inside one zip.
Sometimes an album folder holds nothing but JSON. GPTH_Neo issue #133, filed in July 2026, describes album folders containing only the sidecars, with the actual media living only in the year folder; the fix in 6.1.9 reattaches those orphan JSONs to year-folder files by title and capture year. FixMyTakeout leaves a JSON with no photo beside it alone; the year-folder copy has its own JSON and is fixed from that.
Layout from immich-go #380 and GPTH_Neo #133.
Untitled albums
An album you never named exports under a localized placeholder, often with a number: Sans titre(9), Unbenannt(109). GPTH_Neo keeps the list of placeholders for each language in its constants. immich-go's documentation notes the limit: "All untitled albums can be stored into the same folder. Therefore it's impossible to rebuild original albums." If you had many unnamed albums, expect their photos to arrive mixed together under one such folder.
Keep the albums, skip the second copies
FixMyTakeout keeps the folder layout exactly as exported, so Photos from 2022/ and Amsterdam 2022/ both appear in the output zips, and importers that turn folders into albums (the Immich CLI's --album flag, for one) still see the album names.
The option "Leave out album-folder copies of photos that are already in a Photos from year folder" removes the repeats. A file in an album folder is treated as a copy when a file with the same name and the same size in bytes exists in any year folder of the same export. The album folder itself, and any photo that exists only there, stays. With the option on, the summary shows how many copies were left out; with it off, every copy is fixed and written, so a photo in two albums comes out three times, each with the same date and place.
Which to choose: turn the option on when the output is going into a photo library, where each repeat is another item to scroll past or clean up later. Leave it off when the output is going to a plain drive or NAS folder and you want each album folder to be complete on its own.
Two things the option does not do. It does not compare the pixels, so two genuinely different photos that happen to share a name and a byte count would be treated as a copy, so leave the option off if that worries you. And it does not write album membership into the files; the folder is the album.
Check what was left out
- Before running, note how many files the summary reports and how many are album copies.
- After running, open
fixmytakeout-report.csvand sort byfile. With the option on, each name should appear once in a year folder; with it off, you will see the same name under each album'sfolder. - Unzip a part and confirm the album folders are present and that a photo you know was in an album is in its year folder.