Photos on OS 13 is doing a great job of finding duplicates and making suggestions for merging them. But I've started noticing that it's applying the wrong date to remaining photo.
Ex. Duplicate found; one with a 2008 date and one with a 2020 date. The 2008 photo is the high-res image. Photos correctly keeps the 2008 image when merging, but applies the 2020 date metadata to the file.
Is this happening to anyone else?
Mac mini, macOS 13.0
I am merging the duplicates manually, if the metadata differ.
I want the combined titles and combined descriptions, and the combined set of keywords. Would I allow Photos to merge the photos, one title and one desperation would be lost and to all keywords applied.
In the case of two different different capture dates I usually prefer to keep both images, as they are similar photos of the same scene taken at different times, but not exact duplicates.
Yes, this is happening to me too - incredibly frustrating. I haven't bothered to confirm if this is the case: that the photos are actually getting their metadata merged and the wrong date is being used, or if Photos is just choosing the photo to keep based on a set of ordered rules (e.g. keep photo with larger resolution > keep photo with higher DPI > keep photo with earlier capture date > keep photo with earlier file creation date > etc.). I bought a 3rd party application called Photosweeper to try and do a better job at removing duplicates and it uses rules such as this, but has its own (few) issues.
In my case, I have hundreds of duplicates due to exporting old photos off Facebook and Google Photos that I had (re)uploaded in different years. Problem is they had stripped the original EXIF data so the original capture dates are lost forever. The next best thing is using the dates on the Facebook versions because it's likely they were uploaded closest to the capture dates.
To the original topic, I don't know why Photos would not just merge capture dates and use the earliest one. Surely the far more common case is you have photos that have a date that is later or much later than the date they were taken. Very rarely would you have an incorrect capture date that predates when the photo was taken. Or just let us choose to iteratively go through merge groups and select which metadata to keep like a DIFF/MERGE tool.
Yes! Photos new duplicates found about 1000 duplicate images in my 50K large library. Most have a single date, and the merge works fine. But some duplicate sets of two or three images have more than one date, and the merge command chooses the incorrect date. I can find no way to choose the correct date to apply before the merge. Is there a way? I don't want to have to use the "Adjust date and time..." command after the merge if I don't have to. Thanks!
Photos Merge Duplicates Wrong Date (EXIF metadata)
