I have a Canon R6 camera and have taken photos and 4K videos while on holiday. When I import these to Photos all the videos have a time stamp that is 2 hours after a photo that was taken on the same camera, at the same time. Importing the same photos and videos to a folder on my MacBook, all files are correctly time stamped. This is an on going problem with Photos. Has anyone got a solution?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.2
You are looking at different data. File dates vs exif data.
Again - look in the photos app at the time zone recorded for an image, compared with that for a video. You can check in image>adjust date and time.
Or it could be based on when you imported the images to photos. Because vidoes rarely have exif date data in, photos might use the time of import.
You are looking at different data. File dates vs exif data.
Again - look in the photos app at the time zone recorded for an image, compared with that for a video. You can check in image>adjust date and time.
Or it could be based on when you imported the images to photos. Because vidoes rarely have exif date data in, photos might use the time of import.
It is a mess, as Matti explained. And can neither be blamed on Photos or your camera. The problem is the missing standard for storing the capture time of videos, and the insufficient standard of storing the capture time including the timezone for photos. For photos the capture time is embedded in the metadata, but without the timezone as apart of the capture date. The photos.app is making an educated guess for the timezone the exif tag in the metadata is referring to. We will get different results for photos tagged with GPS or without, for photos imported right from the camera or from a card outside the camera, for photos imported while still in the timezone where the photo has been taken. Videos are treated differently from photos because of the missing standard, so we rarely get the same dates and times as for photos taken at the same place at the same time.
I am using the workaround to take occasionally a photo of my wristwatch with my camera, so I can see the offset between the time in Photos and the local time. My Lumix camera is saving a still frame for each video, so I can compare the time of the videos to the time of the corresponding video with a similar image number and batch adjust the date and time for the videos. Can you tell from the filenames with the image numbers, how the videos should be sorted relative to the photos?
Was the place you were on holiday in a different timezone 2 hours different from home?
Check the timezone setting of the photos compared with the videos in the photos app.
Movie metadata is even a bigger mess than image metadata. It's a complete hot mess of competing standards.
Images (.jpg) use local time but for some weird reason movies (.mp4, .m4v, .mov) use UTC time. There are at least three movie metadata date tags. And often timezones and GPS locations and when the device happens to pick GPS time are flies in the ointment. Different apps and app versions behave differently. It is best just try to find a workflow that works and stick to it. And occasionally manually fix and adjust the dates.
Movie dates and Photos.app - Apple Community
I have looked at the time zones for the images and videos involved in Photos on my MacBook and find that most of my photos have Suva, Fiji as the time zone and the videos have the time zone as Auckland New Zealand. My camera time zone is set to Wellington New Zealand. If I change the time zone for those with Suva , to Auckland or Wellington, the time changes by 1 hour. The weird thing is that Suva, Auckland and Wellington are all in the same time zone.
All this is very confusing and I don’t think it is helped by the fact that I initially imported the photos and videos to my iPad and I am using iCloud for Photos for my iPad and my MacBook. I must admit there is no problem for photos and videos imported from my iPhone. The problem seems to be the combination of the Canon camera and Photos app.
Another contributing factor is that New Zealand has recently changed from Daylight saving to standard time, so I suppose this could account for the 1 hour.
All the photos and videos involved were taken in the Abel Tasman national park which is at the top of the South Island NZ. The nearest time zone city would be Wellington.
These photos and videos were taken in the same time zone, same time, same camera. The problem only occurs when the photos and videos are imported to Photos. Importing them to a folder (not Photos), all the time stamps are correct. It suggests to me that there is a problem with Photos. I know historically that videos do not have EXIF data, but does this still apply with modern cameras? In any case it does not explain why the photos and videos are imported to a folder on my MacBook the time stamp on the videos are correct as are the photos taken at the same time.
So something I've read, but have no experience of.
If the videos have no exif date, then the file date is used on import to photos. If you transfer from iCloud, then this creates a new file on your mac - the file date/time of this is the time when you transferred the video. Is it possible you imported to the ipad an hour or so after shooting?
I remember that I would have imported the images and videos directly from the camera to the iPad quite some time after taking them and there would have been some considerable time before they were uploaded to iCloud, but thank you for your advice. I think there is a multitude of possibilities and no single culprit here.
Cheers
Time stamp of videos in Photos
