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Photos importing with incorrect dates

Nermal

Nermal

Moderator
Original poster
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
21,427
5,303
New Zealand
Hi everyone,

I'm having a new problem, which I think came along with the MacOS 15 upgrade, or maybe iOS 18.

When I import my photos from my iPhone (connect via USB, open Photos app on Mac, click Import) they're coming through with the wrong dates/times.

For example, I took several photos yesterday and they've come into Photos with very strange timestamps attached.

- One stamped 0:00:00, actually taken approx 15:45
- One stamped 0:00:00, actually taken approx 18:30
- One stamped 0:00:00, actually taken approx 19:45
- One stamped 0:00:00, actually taken approx 20:30.

But they're not all supposedly at midnight!

- One stamped 10:00:00, actually taken approx 13:15
- One stamped 10:28:28, actually taken approx 22:30, and I suspect this one is precisely 12 hours out
- One stamped 10:28:33, again taken just after the previous one, so again probably exactly 12 hours out
- One stamped 11:00:06, actually taken approx 13:15
- One stamped 11:04:06, actually taken approx 13:15
- One stamped 11:15:00, again approx 13:15, and certainly wasn't 11 minutes after the previous one
- And finally, a phone screenshot stamped 22:00:00 even though the screenshot was taken at around 14:25, so it's not just limited to photos.

I can't figure out any rhyme or reason for these! If they were all consistently out by the same amount then that would make some sort of sense, but they seem to be all over the place.

Has anyone run into this before?
 
macOS/iOS use date created, date added, date modified, and date last opened. You can e.g. use the metadata list command in the macOS terminal to access that info:
mdls -n kMDItemFSName \
-n kMDItemContentCreationDate \
-n kMDItemContentModificationDate \
-n kMDItemDateAdded \
-n kMDItemUsedDates \
FILENAME

Where exactly do you see the reported differences? For which of these “dates”? Is there a difference between importing via Photos and e.g. ImageCapture?
 
Slartibart said:
Where exactly do you see the reported differences?
Click to expand...
In the Mac Photos app, e.g.

cat.png

This one definitely wasn't taken at 11:04 because it's at my brother's place and I didn't get there until the afternoon.

mdls reports the same dates as Photos (albeit in UTC instead of NZDT):

Code: 
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2024-12-27 10:04:06 pm +0000
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2024-12-27 10:04:06 pm +0000
kMDItemDateAdded               = (null)
kMDItemFSName                  = "9A8192C0-1589-4DA8-B98C-378607CDE31C.jpeg"
kMDItemUsedDates               = (null)

I'll try Image Capture for the next lot and see what happens.
 
a probably silly question: date created and modified on the iPhone -e.g. checking in iOS’s Photos - are correct, aren’t they?
 
Nermal said:
I'll try Image Capture for the next lot and see what happens.
Click to expand...
Argh, I just imported them all with Photos and literally one second after clicking the Import button I remembered that I was going to do this!

Will try again next time... (I have Photos set to delete them off the phone when imported so it's not just a matter of re-importing via IC).
 
OK, Image Capture is showing the incorrect dates too. They're still showing correctly in the iOS Photos app. Toggling Set Automatically has made no difference.

You mentioned 18.2 above: I thought my phone was up to date but it's actually on 18.1.1. I'll edit this post shortly once I've installed 18.2 (it seems it came out almost a month ago so you'd think I'd have a red "1" on Settings by now).

Edit: Updating to 18.2 does not appear to have resolved it, unless existing photos continue to be affected. But this has revealed something interesting: I took a new photo and Image Capture isn't seeing it. I wonder whether there's some sort of background process that needs to run before the photos are exposed to the computer, and maybe that is what's corrupting the dates.
 
Last edited:
Nermal said:
I wonder whether there's some sort of background process that needs to run before the photos are exposed to the computer, and maybe that is what's corrupting the dates.
Click to expand...
Make sure the software needed to connect the iPhone is updated by starting
/Library/Apple/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MobileDeviceUpdater.app or by installing MobileDeviceOnDemand.pkg & CoreTypes.pkg and rebooting

https://swcdn.apple.com/content/dow...l5spk5grss6or2zt2qye/MobileDeviceOnDemand.pkg

https://swcdn.apple.com/content/dow...1aw3k1feoirl5spk5grss6or2zt2qye/CoreTypes.pkg

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102671
 
bogdanw said:
Make sure the software needed to connect the iPhone is updated by starting
/Library/Apple/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MobileDeviceUpdater.app
Click to expand...
Running this appeared to do nothing. However, before running that, I launched Image Capture again. The newest photos are now showing up... but with the wrong timestamps.

Installing those packages did not help.
 
I won't be able to test that until tomorrow. But I just realised that I hadn't tried connecting my phone to my other Mac... and the times are showing up correctly on there! So that's narrowed down the issue to my "day to day" Mac.

The one that's working is an elderly machine running OS 12.7.6 (which is the latest supported on it). The non-working one is on 15.2.
 
Last edited:
Apple has released iOS 18.2.1, allegedly fixing some bugs. Maybe this is one of them.
 
That didn't fix it either.

Something else that I didn't think to try until now: creating a new user on my Mac and running the import from there... also didn't help. Same behaviour as with my usual user account.
 
Any update on this? I have almost exactly the same problem, except I get exactly the same behaviour on both my Macs.

So I did some digging using mdls (list Spotlight Metadata Attributes) and exiftool (which needs to be installed via Brew):
mdls ~/Pictures/test.photoslibrary/originals/F/filename.heic | grep -i "date"
exiftool -G ~/Pictures/test.photoslibrary/originals/F/filename.heic | grep -i "date"
and noticed that the "kMDItemContentCreationDate" and "kMDItemFSContentChangeDate" in Spotlight and "File Modification Date/Time" in EXIF are the ones that are wrong. The fact that it's wrong in the EXIF image metadata indicates that the error is early in the import process (rather than subsequent indexing, say), and thus unlikely to be something we can fix ourselves.

However, I also imported the photos by Airdropping them from iPhone to Mac and then dragging into Photos app. Although the transfer failed the first time (128 photos) it worked second time, and the timestamps are correct. So that's the workaround I'm going to use until Apple fix the bug.

Maybe that helps a little.
 
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