Which Google Takeout files are JSON, and how to read them on Android

A Takeout export is a mixed bag. Some of it is JSON you can read on your phone in a minute, some of it is a mailbox or a calendar file that no JSON viewer will touch, and some of it is far too big for a phone at all. Here’s how to tell them apart before you start tapping.

Written by the developer of Sonnet · Published 21 September 2026 · Not affiliated with Google

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Which files in a Takeout export are JSON?

Takeout gives you one folder per product inside a top-level Takeout folder. What’s inside depends entirely on the product: the ones that record activity tend to be JSON, and the ones that mirror an existing standard use that standard’s format instead.

File names and paths as of September 2026, taken from the list of paths the open-source google_takeout_parser project handles and from migration guides for Gmail, Calendar and Contacts. That project’s own README warns that “the google takeout output changes all the time. Files change names, products are added/removed, fields on the data change” — so treat the names as a guide, not a guarantee, and go by the file extension you actually see.

Choose JSON instead of HTML before you export

Activity products let you pick the format, and the default for history has been HTML rather than JSON. On the Takeout product list, the product’s row has a format button — labelled something like “Multiple formats” — where you can switch History from HTML to JSON. Do that before you start the export: guides to exporting YouTube history note that the choice applies to exports you make afterwards, not to one that’s already queued.

It’s worth the extra tap. The google_takeout_parser README tells its users to “be sure to select JSON instead of HTML whenever possible”, and calls its own HTML support legacy code with worse performance. An HTML activity file also opens in a browser rather than a JSON viewer, which is fine for reading a page of it and useless for inspecting the structure.

What is the .json next to each photo?

If you exported Google Photos, almost half the files in the folder are small JSON sidecars — one per photo or video, holding the details Google keeps outside the image itself. Open one and you’ll see fields along the lines of title, a photoTakenTime object with a Unix timestamp and a human-readable formatted copy of it, and a geoData object with latitude, longitude and altitude. Field names here have changed before, so read what your own file says.

The names of those sidecars changed too. The classic form is IMG_1234.jpg.json; since late 2024 exports have also used IMG_1234.jpg.supplemental-metadata.json, and because the longer suffix gets clipped when the whole name runs too long, you’ll also see truncated variants like IMG_1234.jpg.supplemental-m.json. Tools that merge this data back into photos now match all of those patterns, and a single export can contain more than one of them.

A viewer tells you what one sidecar holds. Writing that metadata back into thousands of photos is a different job and a desktop one — that’s what the Google Photos metadata fixers are for. Use the viewer to check what a sidecar actually contains before you decide whether you need them.

How to open a Takeout JSON file on your Android phone

1. Download the zip from the Takeout email or from Drive. A big export is split across several zips, so make sure you have the one holding the product you want.
2. Open Files by Google or your phone’s file manager, tap the zip and choose Extract.
3. Open the extracted Takeout folder and go to the product folder from the table above.
4. Tap the .json file and open it in a JSON viewer. In Sonnet it arrives as a collapsible tree, so you can fold a year of history down to a handful of rows.
5. If the phone says no app can open the file, that’s a file-type association problem, not a broken file. Opening a JSON attachment on Android covers the share-sheet route around it.

Takeout writes these files by machine, so they’re normally valid JSON and open without complaint. If one does throw an error, the usual cause is a download that stopped early and left the file cut off — what an invalid JSON error means explains how to tell that apart from a genuine syntax problem. New to the format itself? What is a JSON file is the two-minute version.

Sonnet Pro, a one-time unlock, adds search. On a watch history that covers several years, that’s the difference between jumping to a channel name and scrolling for it.

Which Takeout JSON files are too big for a phone?

Size is the real limit, not the format. Sonnet shows the full folding tree for JSON up to about 2 MB for free and opens files up to 20 MB as formatted text; Sonnet Pro raises that to a 30 MB tree and 50 MB files. Most of what’s in the table fits comfortably: Keep notes, Installs.json and the photo sidecars are small, and a normal account’s YouTube history is a few megabytes.

Two of them can be much larger. BrowserHistory.json grows with every page you’ve ever visited, and a guide to processing it treats anything past 100 MB as awkward and anything past 300 MB as a job for a script. A long-lived MyActivity.json for Search can get heavy the same way, although reports agree that the giant part of most exports is Photos, Drive and Gmail rather than activity text.

Check the file size in your file manager before you tap. If it’s past what a phone app can hold in memory, opening a large JSON file on Android lists what to use instead, including the streaming viewers for files in the gigabytes. For a worked example of a mid-sized export, reading your Spotify streaming history covers the same choice at a few megabytes per file.

Location History is no longer in Takeout

Google moved Maps Timeline data from its servers onto the phone, a change announced at the end of 2023 and rolled out through 2025. For accounts that have made the move, Timeline is no longer part of what Takeout exports, and several community projects that used to parse it now say so in their documentation. Exporting your Timeline happens in the Google Maps app on the device instead.

Older exports still contain Records.json or Location History.json, and those are the files that used to run to hundreds of megabytes. They were never a comfortable phone read, and they aren’t now — put them on a computer. If you want the shape of your other data downloads first, reading your Instagram data download walks through a smaller export end to end.

Read your Takeout data on your phone

Sonnet opens JSON files as a collapsible tree, entirely offline, so your export never leaves the device. No ads, no account. Free on Google Play.