Takeout is great for a total archive backup, but using it just to extract photos is where the UX breaks down for most people.
When you export Mail with Takeout, Google dumps your entire history into a huge .mbox file. If you have a 20-year-old account, you're downloading tens of gigabytes of raw text data, headers, and metadata just to get to the images. Once you have that huge file, you still have to figure out a way to extract and decode the image attachments from the raw email text.
Mail Memories just gives you what you want: the photos.
Nah, but thanks. I actually spent a lot of time checking out Takeout, shell scripts, and existing options before writing a single line of code for the app.
Non-technical users don't want to deal with mbox files no matter how many scripts someone recommends. And shell shells scripts...
I made this to bridge the gap. I wanted a utility that handles the protocol mess locally, avoids downloading gigabytes of metadata, skips the cloud, and just gives you your own photos back.
When you export Mail with Takeout, Google dumps your entire history into a huge .mbox file. If you have a 20-year-old account, you're downloading tens of gigabytes of raw text data, headers, and metadata just to get to the images. Once you have that huge file, you still have to figure out a way to extract and decode the image attachments from the raw email text.
Mail Memories just gives you what you want: the photos.