You exported your Snapchat memories, uploaded them to Google Photos, and now your entire timeline is ruined. Every photo shows today’s date. Five years of memories are stacked on top of each other in a single day. Your carefully organized photo library now has a massive blob of images that all claim they were taken on January 7th, 2026.
This happens to almost everyone who imports Snapchat exports to Google Photos. The good news: it’s fixable. The better news: once you understand why it happens, the fix takes about 10 minutes.
Google Photos determines when a photo was taken by reading metadata embedded in the file itself. Specifically, it looks for an EXIF field called DateTimeOriginal. This is the industry standard that every camera and phone uses to record the exact moment a photo was captured.
Here’s the problem: Snapchat exports don’t include this metadata.
When you download your memories from Snapchat, Snapchat gives you two things. First, you get the actual photo and video files. Second, you get a file called memories_history.json that contains all the metadata – dates, times, GPS coordinates, everything.
But here’s what Snapchat doesn’t do: they don’t put that metadata inside the actual files. The dates exist in the JSON file, sitting right there, completely separate from the photos they describe.
So when Google Photos imports your Snapchat files, it looks for DateTimeOriginal, finds nothing, and falls back to the only date it can find – the file creation date. Which is the day you downloaded the export?
This isn’t a Google Photos bug. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The problem is that Snapchat gave you broken files. For a deeper explanation of this metadata issue, see our guide on how to fix Snapchat export EXIF data.
You have two options: manually edit every photo’s date in Google Photos, or fix the files before importing them.
Manual editing works if you have a handful of photos. Google Photos lets you change the date on individual images. But there’s no bulk edit option for dates. If you have 5000 photos, you’re looking at hours of clicking through each one, trying to remember when you actually took it.
Automated fixing embeds the correct dates into the files before you ever upload them. Google Photos then reads the correct metadata automatically. No manual editing required.
For anything more than a dozen photos, the automated approach is the only practical option.
If you only have a few photos to fix, here’s how to do it manually. According to Google’s support documentation, you can edit dates on individual photos:
There’s an important caveat here: when you change the date in Google Photos, you’re only changing it in Google’s database. The original file keeps its incorrect metadata. If you download that photo later or view it in another app, it will still show the wrong date.
The bigger problem is scale. You can do this one photo at a time. While Google Photos does support bulk date editing on the web version (select multiple photos, click the three-dot menu, then “Edit date & time”), this only works well if all photos should have the same date or if you’re shifting all dates by a fixed amount. For Snapchat exports where every photo has a different correct date, you’d need to edit each one individually. With years of memories, this quickly becomes impossible.
ExportSnaps reads your memories_history.json file and embeds the correct EXIF metadata directly into each photo and video file. Every DateTimeOriginal field gets filled in. Every GPS coordinate gets written. The files become complete, properly formatted media files that any photo app can read correctly.
The app processes everything locally on your computer. Your photos never get uploaded anywhere. This matters because we’re talking about years of personal memories here.
It’s been tested with libraries as large as 1,163 GB containing over 64,000 files. Whether you have 200 memories or 20,000, it handles them the same way.
Here’s the complete process from broken export to properly organized Google Photos library.
Step 1: Get your Snapchat export
If you haven’t already, request your data from Snapchat. Go to accounts.snapchat.com, then My Data, and make sure both “Export Memories” and “Export JSON Files” are enabled. Without the JSON files, there’s no metadata to recover. For a detailed walkthrough, see our guide on how to export Snapchat memories.
Snapchat takes 24-48 hours to prepare your download. Once it’s ready, download the ZIP file and extract it. Look for memories_history.json – that’s the file you need.
Step 2: Process with ExportSnaps
Download ExportSnaps for your platform (macOS or Windows). Open the app and drag your memories_history.json file into it.
The app shows you a summary: total files, how many have location data, and estimated size. Choose your output folder and click Start Export.
ExportSnaps downloads the files directly from Snapchat’s servers, embeds all the metadata, and saves the completed files to your output folder. If any files fail due to network issues, it creates a failed.json file you can use to retry just those specific files. If you’ve had trouble with browser downloads timing out, this is a much more reliable approach – see why Snapchat exports fail for more details.
Step 3: Remove the broken photos from Google Photos
Before uploading the fixed files, delete the incorrectly dated ones from Google Photos. Otherwise, you’ll have duplicates – one set showing the wrong date, one set showing the correct date.
You can find them easily since they’re all grouped on the same day (your original upload date).
Step 4: Upload the fixed files
Upload the processed files from your ExportSnaps output folder to Google Photos. Use the Google Photos web uploader, the desktop app, or just drag them into the Google Photos browser window.
Step 5: Check your timeline
Open Google Photos and scroll through your timeline. Your Snapchat memories should now appear on their actual dates, mixed in with your other photos from that time period. The map view should work too, showing where each photo was taken.
If you’ve already imported broken files and don’t want to delete them all, you have a choice.
Option 1: Delete and re-import. This is cleaner. Remove all the incorrectly dated Snapchat photos, process your export through ExportSnaps, and upload the fixed versions. Takes maybe 30 minutes total, depending on your library size.
Option 2: Keep both and manually edit. If you’ve already organized some of those photos into albums or added them to memories, you might not want to delete them. You can keep them and manually edit the dates on the most important ones. Just know that you’ll either have duplicates or incomplete fixes.
For most people, starting fresh is faster. The manual editing approach sounds simpler, but ends up taking far more time.
None of this would be necessary if Snapchat exported properly formatted files. The metadata exists – they have it, they include it in the JSON file, they just don’t put it where it belongs.
Until Snapchat fixes its export process, tools like ExportSnaps bridge the gap. Your memories get the metadata they should have had from the start, and Google Photos can finally organize them correctly.
If you’re also planning to import your Snapchat memories to Apple Photos, the same metadata issue applies there too. The fix is identical – process with ExportSnaps first, then import. You might also want to check out our guide on how to organize your Snapchat exported memories for tips on keeping everything sorted after the import.
Ready to fix your Snapchat export? Download ExportSnaps – it’s free for up to 200 files, and $15 one-time for unlimited processing. Learn more about how it works.
