Json takes up barely any space, so long term storage isn't a problem unless you are pedantic about adding a few extra megabytes compared to your terrabytes of p

Json takes up barely any space, so long term storage isn't a problem unless you are pedantic about adding a few extra megabytes compared to your terrabytes of photos. I recently went through all my Google Photos photos, downloaded everything to physical drives, and then deleted the 80% that are just redundant. I found that selecting photos in batches of months or days, making sure that each batch is less than (Thot Shalt Not Download More Than) 500 images, then downloading in google photos was more reliable than Google takeout, which had a very high rate of download failure. On the topic of seemingly redundant files, what I got back was a bunch of useless .MP files, but a little sleuthing revealed these to be top shot motion videos. https://support.google.com/googlecamera/answer/9937175?hl=en https://support.google.com/googlecamera/answer/9937175?hl=en I guess Google has a licence issue with publishing trillions of .mp4 files, or changes their extension to .MP for some internal purpose. But the upshot is a horrible user experience, many thousands of users will be left scratching their heads before throwing these videos of cherished memories away. Anyway, if you want to batch rename any .MP files on Windows: Navigate to their folder and enter cmd into the file path field, in the terminal rename the extensions using: ren *.MP *.mp4