Photos upload corrupted library? Dates all weird now

alternativematthew wrote:

Is there any way to unscramble the date, or at least recover the photos that are now no longer in the photo library? They were not put into the trash, so I'm trying to locate where they might be.

Make a backup of the library before trying to tweak it. You could then try to rebuild it.

How to use the Photos Repair Library tool on your Mac - Apple Support

You could also manually fix the dates, but that might be difficult if the year is scrambled.

You could do a test by doing "export originals" with the offending movies with scrambled dates, then making a dummy new Photos library, and importing the exported movies there, and checking if the dates are then correct. If they still fail, I'd be curious to see what kind of metadata dates those movies have (if you like, you could put a sample movie in some cloud service like Dropbox so we could inspect it).

alternativematthew wrote:

July 24, 181458

FWIW macOS 10.15-12 Catalina-Monterey Photos scrambled the year to something like '5828963' if there was no time zone in "Keys" or "UserData" imported movie date tags but this was fixed in macOS 13 Ventura and later.

So it is weird that you see a similar error in Ventura. Or is it possible that those movies were imported in earlier macOS and you now notice it in Ventura?