for anyone on (iOS) thinking about dumping google photos do it now, before it's too late. without even looking at this article and post if have been migrating

for anyone on (iOS) thinking about dumping google photos do it now, before it's too late. without even looking at this article and post if have been migrating off google to iOS. i have over 13,000 photos and videos in google photos that i tried to "take out" this weekend and move over to icloud: -the take out process gave me 3 zip files with total size of 108gb when only 80gb are actual images/videos. there is essentially 2x .json files for each picture that google adds their own data to -the takeout process absolutely breaks live photos. the 3MB originals become 200K stills. - the take out process creates .mov files which are not importable into photos/iclouds - the take out process creates .jpg files which are not importable into photos/iclouds, they're full size pictures but the only .jpg that works is a duplicate at fraction of original size. - out of over 13K "take out" files i was only able to import a little over 11K, what happened to the 2K images i have no idea, i don't even know how to parse through them, with all of the extra.json files all over the place it's an effing mess. i tried also downloading directly from photos apps. after it "creating a zip" archive for me about 6x in 8 hours and constantly failing i did notice that my browser tried to download over 60 individual 2gb zip files, a complete mess that never did work out. i finally got the back up & sync option working (the one that's actually going away) and was able to sync, overnight, all 13K images and videos to my desktop. there are no extra json files and all live photos seem to be exactly as they were. tonight i'll be deleting the 11K photos from icloud and re-importing the clean 13K files i downloaded through backup&sync last night, I hope it goes much smoother. i think this is intentional lock-in by google, as long as you use the google photos app on ios it shows you all images just fine, along with live photos, but what you forget is that you no longer own these photos, not in bulk anyways. as soon as you try to take them out you get crippled versions on there and you see the level of privacy invasion that google take your photos to (by adding their own tag data through .json files). if you have a lot of images invested in google but are not on the android platform really do consider getting out now.