`detect-google-conflicts.sh` — Reference¶

Finds every photo on Proton Drive whose capture time disagrees with the real capture time recorded by Google Photos for the same original file.

This is the ground-truth check that complements detect-album-conflicts.sh: instead of inferring an expected year from an album's name, it reads Google's own photoTakenTime (from the *.supplemental-metadata.json sidecar that a Takeout export writes next to every original file) and compares it with what Proton currently stores as captureTime. Any difference means the photo has the wrong date on Proton.

Platform: Linux (GNU date/coreutils).
Dependencies: proton-drive CLI (authenticated), jq, date, find, awk, sort, cut.

Why this check is needed¶

Photos imported from Google Photos often end up with a wrong capture time on Proton:

Videos have no supplemental-metadata.json in Takeout, so the CLI fell back to the extraction timestamp instead of the recording date.
Images sometimes carry an EXIF date that Google had rewritten, or no usable EXIF at all, so Proton again falls back to the upload/extraction date.

detect-album-conflicts.sh approximates the correct year from the album name; this script uses Google's authoritative timestamp instead, and also covers photos whose album name does not reveal the year.

Usage¶

detect-google-conflicts.sh --local-source DIR [--timeline FILE] [-o FILE]

Flags¶

Flag	Description
`-s, --local-source`	Required. Directory with the original Google Photos files (one folder per album).
`-i, --index`	The sha1 index file. Defaults to `DIR/.sha1-index.txt`. Useful when the index can't be written next to the photos (e.g. a read-only mount) or to point at a freshly rebuilt index.
`-t, --timeline`	A pre-fetched `proton-drive photo timeline -d --json` dump. Skips the ~1 min live fetch; useful when re-running with the same timeline.
`-o, --output`	Write the fix TSV to this file (default: stdout).
`-h, --help`	Show the script help.

Output¶

A fix TSV, one line per conflict, ready for fix-photo-date.sh:

<filename><TAB><nodeUid><TAB>YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

The date column is Google's real photoTakenTime (converted to the server's timezone), so fix-photo-date.sh uses the correct date even when the album name would have suggested something different.

How it works¶

Local map. Every *.supplemental-metadata.json sidecar is read in a single batched jq pass (using input_filename), and joined against the sha1 index to yield sha1 → (real epoch, basename) for each local photo.
Timeline. The Proton Photos timeline is fetched (or read from --timeline) and collapsed to sha1, uid, name, captureTime.
Compare. Each timeline photo with a known sha1 is matched to its local real date (fallback: unique-filename match, which covers files whose bytes differ, e.g. NEF converted to JPG by Proton). If the UTC date parts disagree, it is a conflict.
Filename fallback. Photos with no sidecar (e.g. WhatsApp IMG-YYYYMMDD-WAxxxx(x).jpg, VID-YYYYMMDD-WAxxxx.mp4, P_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS, VIDEO_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS, FB_IMG_<epoch>, YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS-MOTION.gif) fall back to a date parsed from the filename itself. Only validated dates are used (a bare year is ignored to avoid false positives); truly undatable files (e.g. CIMG1703.AVI) are skipped.

Building the sha1 index (important)¶

The index must be built case-insensitively, otherwise uppercase files (DSCN0810.JPG, *.MOV, *.HEIC, *.NEF, …) are silently skipped:

find /media/12tb/photos -type f \
  \( -iname '*.jpg' -o -iname '*.jpeg' -o -iname '*.heic' -o -iname '*.png' \
     -o -iname '*.mp4' -o -iname '*.mov' -o -iname '*.nef' \) \
  -exec sha1sum {} + > /media/12tb/photos/.sha1-index.txt

Note: a case-sensitive lowercase-only index misses ~31,500 uppercase files (~23% of the library), so always use -iname.

Typical workflow¶

# 1. Build the (case-insensitive) sha1 index — once, after extracting Takeout
find /media/12tb/photos -type f \
  \( -iname '*.jpg' -o -iname '*.jpeg' -o -iname '*.heic' -o -iname '*.png' \
     -o -iname '*.mp4' -o -iname '*.mov' -o -iname '*.nef' \) \
  -exec sha1sum {} + > /media/12tb/photos/.sha1-index.txt

# 2. Detect all Google-sourced conflicts
~/gphoto2proton/detect-google-conflicts.sh \
  --local-source /media/12tb/photos --output fixes-google.tsv

#    If /media/12tb/photos is not writable by your user (read-only mount or
#    owned by another account), build the index elsewhere and pass it explicitly:
#    ~/gphoto2proton/detect-google-conflicts.sh --local-source /media/12tb/photos \
#      --index ~/gphoto2proton/.sha1-index.txt --output fixes-google.tsv

# 3. Review the TSV, then fix (using the same local source for speed + the
#    real dates, and --exif-date so images honour the corrected date too)
~/gphoto2proton/fix-photo-date.sh --file fixes-google.tsv \
  --album-cache photo-cache --local-source /media/12tb/photos \
  --exif-date --yes

detect-google-conflicts.sh — Reference¶