How to sync GPS location data from google photos backend?

[lefuturiste]

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

I'm syncing my entire backlog of pictures in google photos. It's working great but I also want to keep as much as the meta data as possible, namely the location data (like GPS coordinates and such).
I ran Image magick identify -verbose on the image downloaded by rclone to identify the Exif data and I can see some EXIF Data but no data about the location or GPS.
So my question is : How to get rclone to also take the metadata that google know about.

I think there is three possibilities here:

• the picture has no location
• the picture has location in the original exif data (but google strip the exif about location for privacy or unknown reasons?)
• the picture has no location in the original exif but google somehow managed to vaguely associate a date and time based on some other mechanism. It is showing that on the UI but the image downloaded by rclone doesn't contains that)

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

rclone v1.53.3-DEV

• os/arch: linux/amd64
• go version: go1.15.9

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

Google Photos

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

rclone copy gphotos: ./ --tpslimit 1 -v

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

hello and welcome to the forum,

could this be the issue?

"When Images are downloaded this strips EXIF location"
https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#downloading-images

that version of rclone is many years old, best to update to v1.62.2 and test again
https://rclone.org/downloads/#script-download-and-install

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

@lefuturiste

the picture has location in the original exif data (but google strip the exif about location for privacy or unknown reasons?)

This is the reason.

The only way to get an unaltered image is to download them from the Google photos website or do a Google take out.

This is very annoying but Google don't seem to want to change it probably because people use the API to implement web apps to process other people's photos .