What's Inside Your Google Takeout? A Free Mac App That Tells You

You ask Google for your archive, wait a few days, and then ten ZIP files of twenty gigabytes each land in your Downloads folder. You double-click one out of curiosity, find a folder called Takeout with thirty subfolders in it, and close the window. Six months later it is still there, and you still don’t know what’s in it.

That is the problem Takeout Reports solves. It is our second Mac app, it is free, and it does one thing: it opens the archive and tells you what is inside.

A report, not a viewer

There are plenty of tools that open one file out of a Takeout. This one measures the whole thing and hands you the figures: how many messages, how many photos and videos, which years they span, how many actions Google recorded about you, and which services Google declared but sent back empty.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A Takeout is not a tidy backup; it is whatever Google happened to export that week. Knowing that Calendar came back with four events and Maps with none is information — about your archive, and about what Google actually kept.

Version 1 gives you the figures and lets you browse the archive read-only. Opening a message, a photo or a JSON to see what it holds is included; that’s as far as it goes.

It never unzips anything

Every file is read directly inside the ZIP. No extracting, no copying, no temporary duplicate of a 200 GB archive on a disk with thirty gigabytes free.

Multi-part archives — takeout-…-001.zip, -002, and so on — are presented as a single tree, and if one of them is missing you are told before you get a report with holes in it, rather than after.

It counts records, not files

A service can hand you three JSON files and still be empty. Counting files tells you nothing; the report opens what is in there and counts what you actually have — messages, senders, labels, contacts, events, albums, bookmarks, sites visited.

And when it could only measure part of a service, it says so. An honest “measured in part” is worth more than a confident number that is wrong.

It cannot reach the network — and that is checkable

The app has no network access entitlement. This is not a promise in a privacy policy: it is the operating system refusing to grant something the app never asks for. Your archive does not leave your Mac, nothing is uploaded, and everything works exactly the same with Wi-Fi off. No analytics, no identifiers, no account.

For an archive that contains twenty years of your mail and every photo you ever took, that seemed like the only defensible design.

When it finds mail, Mbox Viewer takes over

Takeout exports Gmail as one enormous MBOX file. Takeout Reports counts it — 8,763 messages, 330 senders, 14 labels — and then offers to open it, because reading it is the job of the other app in the house: Mbox Viewer, on Mac and on Windows, on that very same file.

That is why the two live at the same address. One tells you what you have; the other lets you read it.

Free, and what comes next

The full report and the browsing are free forever, with no size limit and no cap on services. Looking at what you have is not something we charge for.

Paid features will come later, and they are all on the other side of the same line: getting data out and transforming it — batch export, repairing photo metadata, searching the whole archive. None of that is in this version, and the page doesn’t pretend otherwise.

It needs macOS 14 or later, reads ZIP (recommended), TGZ and the already-extracted folder, and speaks eighteen languages. Everything about it is here.

It has been on the Mac App Store since 27 August.

Get Takeout Reports on the Mac App Store →

Takeout Reports is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Google and Google Takeout are trademarks of Google LLC.