Comment by alyandon 8 days ago
The only data I care about on the phone already gets backed up by Google and is then exported regularly via Google Takeout. I don't live on my phone so I tend not to generate much of any value on it other than random pictures of things.
Prior to Google automatically backing up everything, I used Titanium Backup.
I didn't know about Google Takeout despite having searched for a way to get my photos out years ago. Blows me away.
The problem with Takeout is it removes the metadata from your photos. Google wants you locked in to Google Photos. Years ago they also removed the ability to sync with Google Drive, so the only way to get your photos out without losing metadata is to download them directly from photos.google.com, 50 at a time
AFAIK Takeout + Photos returns the original image file exactly as it originally existed, EXIF intact. Any additional metadata you have added manually is placed in a JSON file with the same name, adjacent to the image file.
It sounds like you want Photos to somehow merge that added metadata back into the image files, altering them. I'm quite confident that there would be an equal number of people complaining about changing their originals, if photos did that.
Based on my November 2020 Google takeout of 30 gigabytes of photos that I just spot sampled from my Synology, I can verify that the EXIF information on my photos from 2012 (jpg format) include the phone that I took the picture with, the aperture and shutter speed, the date and the time. I didn't do anything other than download the zip files and then extract them.
Just to note, it seems Titanium Backup is no longer maintained (last Play store update in 2019) and definitely does not work on more recent versions of Android.
I've found Swift Backup pretty much fills the same role at TB.