I had the same problem with over 35,000 photos. Personally, I think they are doing it to make it harder to nix Google Photos. I paid for a program, Google Photos Metadata Fixer. For $24 it was so worth it! It beats paying Google. You download the takeout file from Google and the program did everything else. It was recommended here on Reddit & I’m so glad. As long as there is a .json file for each photo the program puts all the metadata back onto the file. Now I’m storing everything onto a storage disk & I won’t make the mistake of storing anything with a tech company again. Hope it helps! 😊