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How do you prevent photo dates from changing?

Usually when my wife & I move photos from our phones to our external hard drives, things have worked OK in the past. When my wife got her iPhone 8 a while back we started having all kinds of trouble. I won't get into to all of that on this thread, but my particular question here is: Why does creation date & modified date get lost sometimes? (I'm still confused with those terms anyway as Modified date always seems to precede Creation date which makes zero sense) But now we have hundreds of pictures & videos from the last 2 years we want to organize on our hard drives but the dates are now saying they are all from this year? THE most import bit of metadata when organizing family photos is the date the picture was taken. Thanks for any help!

iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 12

Posted on Dec 20, 2020 10:32 AM

Top-ranking reply

TonyCollinet

Level 7

23,966 points

Posted on Dec 20, 2020 12:19 PM

You need to distinguish between the file metatdata (information about the file) and the image metadata (information about the image in the file)

If you copy a file the copies creation date will normally be set to the date the file was copied. The image metadata inside the file (which you can view in preview with the inspector window, iptc tab) will show the image capture date.

Summary:

The File metadata is kept in the file system, and represents when that copy of the file is created or modified

The image metadata is kept inside the file, as exif and IPTC data. This won't change when you copy / move the file.

You can also see the two different dates in finder, as shown in the screenshot. This is from an image I exported from photos today - so the file has been created and last modified today, but the content creation date is still showing 2015...

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How do you prevent photo dates from changing?

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