@tony_b you are correct and I don’t have additional tips or tricks to share. While I was in Italy, I needed to start download and unzip remotely on my PC which stays in Germany, because the Internet connection is too unstable at the place, where we stay in Italy and even the download crashed several times. For that it might help, to split the file in smaller pieces (an option in the request), but this max download and unzip even more tedious.
Nevertheless, I appreciate having it done it leas once, to create a base to understand, which images I uploaded and exactly when(!). For newer posts, I keep track of that manually, but might use the Takeouts for photos maybe once a year and for reviews sporadically (this is much easier).
The other thing is: Unless, you don’t have the original images anymore, 99.9..% of the takeout is useless, but the remaining less than 1% in the form of JSON text files contain the view, as well as the date and time the photo was taken and uploaded. A little script could be written easily to convert this into a CSV file to be loaded into a spreadsheet to provide a better overview. If you don’t need the original image files, a Python script would also be able to read the zipped file, but if I remember correctly, there was a size limitation with that.
Interesting is still the difference between what we see under My Contributions and in the Takeouts. About a third of the views under Contributions have higher numbers than the takeouts. Some with significant differences.
For those who don’t know, how to request a takeout, I described it here more than a year ago (for a different purpose).
CC @JustJake