Apple Photos on iphone curating media based on file creation date rather than date taken

Hi,

Noob here. This is possibly an extension of a previous post but I cannot open that one up to add. Thank you in advance for any advice on something that has plagued me for a week. I am kind of a self-appointed family archivist, with scans of photos going back to the 1900s, so obviously the file "Date Created" tag often bears no resemblance to the date of the original photo. Being able to arrrange chronologically is therefore important to me.

Anyhow, I bought an Apple iphone 15 pro with 500gb storage, wanting an easy way to present them. I thought i would start small, using c. 10k of photos only, taken mainly with a samsung note 8 (n950?). I store about 40k of them on a NAS, which I synchronise with other devices as required. Also using an hp zbook (500gb) to facilitate the synchronisation of photos stored by date taken (e.g. file name 20200118_12345) in folders named 2019-2024.

I began with just a few hundred files and was dead impressed with the personalised reels produced by the ai engine, justifying my purchase I thought. But I then noticed some date oddities where 2019 , 2020 etc., photos were appearing to have been taken last week. I assumed I had some integrity issues somewhere and set about comparing with the master data on the NAS and its backups. I refreshed the stock, wiped the sync and tried again.

At first I just bulk uploaded them from a single folder and the data seemed to arrive in sensible looking year order on the iphone. But then I noticed again that most of the photos had migrated to this year - and week in 2024. After a few synchronisations and much head-scratching over why this was happening, I sorted them into a "year" order structure and tried again, wiping out the "ipod" folder that gets created in the PC file structure to get a clean start each time.

Shortly after it completed its business, I realised something was going on with the Photos "curation" process and photos were being re-categorised based on the creation date of the photo rather than the date taken or other. So they mostly end up presented as having been taken last Tuesday, the date I copied them from the nas to the PC.

A feature of the way I am synchronising to this laptop is that when the photos arrive on my laptop from the nas, they acquire a new date created, although the other dates, taken, modified and just "Date", are preserved at the original values when taken and stored, although one or two can have a later "modified date". Some tags I can alter within the file which will alter the modified date, so that cannot be the "key" field. I am unable to easily modify the creation date, which seems to be system applied. I have yet to try a tool such as robocopy to see if it will preserve the original "date created", although this feels like something I shouldn't have to do, and in any event, it will not cater for the scanned files, although to be honest I would settle for the "modern" files taken digitally since 2003 being presented in the correct year. If no flexibility or remedy exists, I may have to look at another tool (adobe etc.) in order to turn my trove into movies. I have previously tried ACDSee, which categorised them successfully by year.

Thought I would reach out to the community before taking an axe to the project.

Happy Sunday!

g