No Original Date And Time When Downloading Photos

Hi

You are ALREADY downloading with the original date - but you are looking in the wrong place for it.

The FILE date that you see in finder cannot be relied upon to be the original date when you took the picture. That is not what it is for - it is for the date when that copy of the file was created. You need to look at the image capture date which is in the metadata inside the image file. You need an app that knows how to see that, such as the Photos app, or the preview app.

For example open one of your downloaded images with the preview app. Go to tool>inspector, click on the Exif tab - there is date/time digitised, and date/time original.

There is simply no way to preserve the file creation date reliably when moving files between devices. The Finder will preserve the file creation date, if you move a file between folders on the same volume, but not, when a new copy of the file is created, when downloading from iCloud or copying to a different device. iCloud Photos may be changing the creation date already when the file is uploaded and merged into the existing iCloud Photos Library, as iCloud Photos will check for duplicates and keep only one version of the file, if a duplicate already exists in iCloud.

Hi

You need to distinguish between the file metadata (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.

(Depending on your system version, if you export unmodified original from photos, you will usually get a file with the same creation date as the image)


You can also see the two different dates in finder, as shown in the screenshot with finder in column view. This is from an image I exported from photos in july 2019 - so the file has been created and last modified then, but the content creation date is still showing 2011...

However, finder (which is a file manager) can only sort by file dates, not by the photo metadata. You need a photo app for that.

There are two kinds of metadata involved when you consider jpeg or other image file.

One is the file data. This is what the Finder shows. This tells you nothing about the contents of the file, just the File itself.

The problem with File metadata is that it can easily change as the file is moved from place to place or exported, e-mailed, uploaded etc.

Photographs have also got both Exif and IPTC metadata. The date and time that your camera snapped the Photograph is recorded in the Exif metadata. Regardless of what the file date says, this is the actual time recorded by the camera.

Photo applications like Photos, CaptureOne, Lightroom, Mylio, Photoshop etc get their date and time from the Exif metadata.

When you export from iPhoto to the Finder new file is created containing your Photo (and its Exif). The File date is - quite accurately - reported as the date of Export.

However, the Photo Date doesn't change.

The problem is that the Finder doesn't work with Exif.

So, your photo has the correct date, and so does the file, but they are different things. To sort on the Photo date you'll need to use a photo app.

There are apps that will edit the file data to match the Exif. This is one:

https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.html