Google Takeout is kind of a nightmare.
Fortunately I already went through the hassle of extracting my photos a while back. It was something like 45 downloads of 2GB zip files, with really chaotic organization of photos.
But I tried to do Google Takeout of just a few things, including Email (which is under 2GB usage) but not including photos. Somehow it still created 63 files, each 2GB in size. I just threw up my hands and gave up. I got my email using IMAP + Thunderbird, and I exported my contacts. The rest is going in the bin.