How to move Snapchat Memories to Google Photos with the right dates

1. Request your data on My Data with Memories included. The checklist is in How to export Snapchat Memories with dates and locations, and Snapchat Memories export not working covers a download that stalls.
2. Download every ZIP part and keep the files zipped.
3. Add all the parts to Photo Date Fixer at once. Compare the first five photos on the review screen with what you remember. To have captions and stickers in the pictures, switch on “Put captions and stickers back onto the photos”.
4. Save the fixed parts and unzip them on your computer. Each year gets its own folder.
5. If you kept the captions as separate files, move the files with -overlay in their name out of those folders, so they do not upload as pictures of their own.
6. Upload. Google's help page gives these steps: on your computer, open photos.google.com, select “Create and add photos” at the top right, select “Import photos” under “Add photos”, find and select your photos, then select “Open”. You can also drag photos from your computer onto an album to upload them.

Google Photos goes by the date and time saved in a photo, and its help page calls that the original date and time saved by your camera. The photos in a Snapchat export have no capture date inside the file. The real time sits in a separate memories list, in UTC, which Google Photos never reads. With nothing inside the file, an app falls back to the file's own time, and unzipping and copying can change that. The guide Why your Snapchat Memories show the wrong date follows one photo through this.

Google Photos can change dates after the upload, but not in a way that fits an export. Its help page describes “Edit date & time”, and for several items two choices: “Shift dates & times”, which moves them all relative to the first one, and “Set one date & time”. Every memory in an export has its own date, so neither choice fits more than a handful of photos. The same page also says that if you share a photo to other apps or download it, the photo may show the original date and time saved by your camera, so a date edited inside Google Photos stays there. A date written into the file travels with it.

Google's help page says your photo may have a location if your device's camera saves your location with the photo. Photo Date Fixer writes the position from the memories list into the photo's GPS fields, the place a camera uses, for every memory where Snapchat saved a place. Memories without a location in the list get none, and you can add one by hand in Google Photos later.

The same page says a location saved with the photo cannot be changed or removed in Google Photos, and that a downloaded copy shows the location the device saved. Keep that in mind before you share an album widely.

Google's help page lists JPG, PNG and WebP among the photo types and MP4 among the video types it accepts. Photos can be up to 200 MB or 200 MP, videos up to 10 GB, and items must be larger than 256 x 256 pixels. Uploads count against your Google Account storage, which Google Photos shares with Google Drive and Gmail, so check your free space before you upload years of memories.

The fixer sets each MP4 video's creation time and, when the list has one, its location, without encoding the video again. Photos keep their pixels unless you chose to put the captions back on, in which case those photos are saved again as high-quality JPEG files.