US Tech Automations

For families with a Google Takeout download works offline

Photo Lifeboat

If you have downloaded your Google Photos as Takeout ZIP files, this turns them into a family album folder that opens on any computer with no Google account and no internet, with your albums, captions and dates kept. It runs in your own Chrome or Edge browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Price
$29 once
Built for
A parent or family keeper who already asked Google for a Takeout download
Runs in
Chrome or Edge on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer
Sample
Open a finished sample album

Buy — $29One payment. You get one HTML file to save on your computer. No account, no licence key, no subscription.

What you get

  • A finished folder: Library holds every photo and video filed by year and month, and Albums holds one page per album.
  • An album viewer, index.html, to browse by album or by year with your captions and dates. It opens with the network switched off.
  • The date Google had stored for each photo is written back into JPEG files that were missing one. Other files are left exactly as Google exported them; their date is kept in the list and the viewer.
  • A list of every file with its SHA-256 fingerprint (manifest.csv), and a second list (UNKNOWN.csv) of anything it could not match to its details or date. It never guesses a date.

How you use it

  1. Save the file you receive and open it in Chrome or Edge.
  2. Choose all your Takeout ZIP files, then choose an empty folder.
  3. Press build. Big libraries take a while; the ZIP files are read a piece at a time and are never changed.

What it cannot do

  • It needs Chrome or Edge on a computer. Safari, Firefox and phones cannot save a folder, so they cannot run it.
  • It cannot recover photos that were never in your Google download. Check your Takeout export is complete first.
  • Dates are in UTC, because Google does not store the time zone.
  • Some formats, such as HEIC and some video types, are kept and listed but your browser may not be able to show them in the viewer.
  • It is not legal advice and does not certify who owns a photo.
  • We have tested it on a small made-up Takeout, not yet on real multi-gigabyte exports in a browser. That is stated so you are not surprised.

Is there a free way?

Yes. Free open-source helpers exist that put dates back into Takeout photos, and if you are comfortable with a command line they may be all you need. The best-known one we looked at fixes dates but does not build an album viewer. Photo Lifeboat adds the offline album viewer, keeps captions and albums, lists what it could not match, and needs no install and no licence server.

Try it first

The sample album was built by this tool from a small made-up Takeout (tiny generated pictures, invented captions). The made-up ZIP files are here if you want to run the tool on them yourself: takeout-001.zip and takeout-002.zip.

Questions or a refund

ustechautomations@gmail.com