This simple Python script runs easily on Mac and puts the EXIF data back into photos exported from Facebook - including description, location and most importantly, date taken. To get started, you'll first need to download your Facebook data in JSON format and unzip it.
This is inspired by the excellent project over at AddShore, which is written in Java and requires a JRE. That didn't seem to work on my Mac, so I wrote a basic clone in Python.
There's only one technical requirement - you must have installed ExifTool first. If you're on Mac, just download the MacOS Package and run the installer.
You also must have downloaded your Facebook data in JSON format - the default is HTML format and is not supported by this script.
Edit the facebook_fix_exif.py script and update the following line to point to your downloaded and unzipped Facebook JSON repo:
PATH_TO_FACEBOOK_EXPORT = '/Users/jamiebrown/Downloads/facebook-jamiebrown'You can then run the script in the command line:
python facebook_fix_exif.pyThe script will run through your photos and add the EXIF tags where possible. Note that it edits the files in-place - so if this is the only copy of your photos then make sure you have a backup first.
The script probably will work on Windows if you have Python installed, but may need some tweaks to paths etc.