Hey man, thanks for following up!
I deleted my PhotoStructure library to start fresh with the same batch of photos with the JSON sidecars from Google Takeout, and… nope. It’s still a mess.
Every photo you see here was not taken in 2020/2021. Some of them were scanned in 2020. But a lot of the ones in 2021 weren’t scanned in 2021 nor were they taken in 2021.
I picked one at random, so let’s see what we can see. This picture is not a victim of the weird naming issues of the last time. Here’s what it looks like in PS:
I can see that the naming of the sidecar file is fine. But the modified date of these files is… May 8, 2021, which is what it is dated in PS:
And here are the contents of the JSON file attached to this particular photo:
{
"title": "image-0142.jpeg",
"description": "Lynne Meitner\n1947\n[unknown] Rest Cemetary",
"imageViews": "0",
"creationTime": {
"timestamp": "1596250831",
"formatted": "Aug 1, 2020, 3:00:31 AM UTC"
},
"photoTakenTime": {
"timestamp": "-725791800",
"formatted": "Jan 1, 1947, 3:10:00 PM UTC"
},
"geoData": {
"latitude": 0.0,
"longitude": 0.0,
"altitude": 0.0,
"latitudeSpan": 0.0,
"longitudeSpan": 0.0
},
"geoDataExif": {
"latitude": 0.0,
"longitude": 0.0,
"altitude": 0.0,
"latitudeSpan": 0.0,
"longitudeSpan": 0.0
}
}
(Unrelated side note: I hope eventually we can get those descriptions to show up, because that’s how I preserved the writings on the backs of old photos when I uploaded them to Google Photos. I know it’s one of a billion things you’re working on - as long as they are preserved in the sidecars for now, we’ll get there.)
So… it appears the “file modified” information is what is getting pulled into PhotoStructure. Interesting.