Metadata in different time zones - nightmare

Is there anything new? I'm bothered by multiple problems with timestamps.

First, many edits have not been saved and the 600s Photos I painfully adjusted are just messed up again.

Second, Photos apparently conflicting data?

In the information panel, the Photo shown below is taken at 16:27 CET, in the adjustment panel at 16:27 GMT+9?

How is that even possible?

PS: The Feedback form has not enough signs to even explain the problem.

I experience this bug especially when sorting pictures and videos together.

In my case, all the pictures were sorted correctly, but all the videos were offset exactly the difference between the timezone the video was shot in and my home town timezone.

After following the instructions from ngyinchern (many thanks at this point for the tutorial on your blog! Helped a lot!) I found out that the videos still had the time zone from my home town (The time stamp although was the correct local time). So apparently for videos the meta data for time zone dosen't get touched at all! After changing the time zone to the correct local time zone (were the video was taken), everything was sorted correctly again.

Another thing I found out: When turning on flight mode on your iPhone, the pictures will get tagged with your home town time zone!

I took pictures while I was on a plane (still on ground at the airport), and at some time during taxi to the runway, I turned on flight mode. All the pictures taken afterwards did not show the local time zone in Photos but the time zone from my home town and therefore were sorted incorrectly!

A further tidbit on this problem that I encountered upon return from a 5-week trip to far-away places last month. We traversed 5 different time zones with 4 different image-capture devices (700+ photos). Upon return, I had lots of problems getting everything into proper order in Photos.

I found that screenshots taken while traveling didn't get tagged with the correct timezone. Instead, they got assigned the 'hometown' timezone (the TZ on the Mac when the screenshots were imported into Photos from iPhone).

I also found an issue with iPhone photos taken when the iPhone did not have a good GPS lock (i.e. in urban canyons, when underground, inside buildings, etc). Most of my iPhone photos were taken outdoors, and were geo-tagged correctly. Subsequently, when imported into Photos, the Photos program would usually assign the correct time zone based on the actual location where the photo was taken. But photos taken when the GPS lock was poor ended up with 'hometown' timezone, and thus were out of order in Photos.

It appears that certain categories of images (screenshots, movies, photos with no GPS lock) get captured by the iPhone with no geo-coordinates nor timezone metadata. When imported, Photos then assigns the hometown timezone as default, since it doesn't know what else to use.

It appears that certain categories of images (screenshots, movies, photos with no GPS lock) get captured by the iPhone with no geo-coordinates nor timezone metadata. When imported, Photos then assigns the hometown timezone as default, since it doesn't know what else to use.

And even if an iPhone or iPad photo has the correct GPS location, it does not help, if the iPhone is set to change the timezone automatically, because we do not know, when the iPhone can connect to time servers after crossing the border between states. On long train ride across borders it can happen, that the GSP of the photos is showing the country as Yukon, Canada, but if the Date &Time of the iPhone is still set to Alaska, the time will be off by one hour. It is dangerous, that the iPhone is inferring the timezone from the GPS or the current location. The only sensible thing to do would be to write the time zone settings of the device to the metadata of photo, when a photo is taken. The iPhone does know the timezone, when it takes the photo. It should preserve this information. And when importing photos from a card or camera, the Mac should give the user an opportunity to tell photos the timezone the camera has been set to and which use.

Aperture's Import panel has to options to be set, when traveling between timezones. For each import we can set the "camera time" and the "Actual time".

Whenever I change the date and time setting of a camera or device to the local time zone, I take a picture of my wrist watch. Then I can see, which time stamp Photos is assigning for this photo on import and can calculate the offset to fix it.

There is simply no reliable way to infer the time zone of the capture time the camera or device used when the picture has been taken. The current system time or the timezone of the GPS location are a good guess, but may be totally wrong. We simply do not know, when and if the user did change the timezone for the camera time after crossing the border. And frequently we will be in a different state, when we are importing the photos. The user should be given an opportunity when importing photos to confirm the the timezone that Photos will be using and to modify it right away, if need be.

The "picture of your wrist watch" tip is a great idea.

I use the HoudahGeo application to clean up missing/incorrect geo-coordinates, and also correct bad time stamps. The Houdah UI makes it quite easy to see the location info stored in the EXIF metadata, and copy lat/long data from one image to another if so desired. I found HG very helpful when consolidating the many vacation pictures taken on our various cameras -- getting them into the correct order

It will also clean up bad geo-data. I have a Panasonic Lumix with an integrated GPS receiver. It's great when it works. But the Lumix firmware has bugs which can cause it to write illegal lat/long numbers into the EXIF. Apple Photos can crash when it trips over the out-of-bounds values. Yet another shortcoming of Photos:-(

But the Lumix firmware has bugs which can cause it to write illegal lat/long numbers into the EXIF. Apple Photos can crash when it trips over the out-of-bounds values. Yet another shortcoming of Photos:-(

Have you already reported this bug to Apple? The Lumix is not the only camera that can make Photos crash, if longitude and latitude are out of bounds. Apple will need examples of these data for all cameras to fix it.

HudahGeo is great, yes. But I started long ago to use JetPhoto Studio, that is also very convenient and will keep using it while it is still updated regularly.

@Leonie,

Yes, I reported this bug to Apple, ages ago. Got it escalated to Engineering. I spent many hours on the phone with a senior tech, sent him test cases, crash dumps, samples of 'bad' JPEGs, and collected logs using the Capture Data tool, etc. Nothing came of it. When I subsequently followed up with the Apple guy, he could/would not confirm that the bug was ever going to be fixed. Not having adequate supplies of starch, I gave up pushing on the rope.

On the other hand, I reported the problem to Mr. Houdah (Pierre Bernard). He turned around an enhancement to HoudahGeo that detected/corrected the bad lat/long values in a couple of days. I now use HG to clean up all the photos taken with the Lumix before Photos gets a chance to mess with them.

Hello Rikscha.

I had a similar problem too when I travelled to Thailand on holiday. Thailand is 5 hours ahead of South Africa which is my country of origin. When I returned home I imported all the pictures from my iPhone 7 into Photos on my Mac Book, they were showing the correct timestamp for example a photo that was taken at 17:00 Phuket time, was showing a timestamp of 17:00 on my Mac Book and correctly geotagged. Some pictures had the correct timestamp but still displaying in the wrong order in the album and in the photos list. What was worse was when I synced my Thailand album from iTunes to my iPhone 7 the photos timestamps were subtracting 5 hours and now the photos that were taken at 17:00 were displaying 12:00 on my iPhone 7 but not on my Mac.

However it was giving me no issues when I synced up the album with iPhoto as all the timestamps were correct on my iPhone 7. Hold down option on the keyboard to make a new library with Photos and iPhoto.

So I exported all my photos to a folder on the desktop and made a new library in iPhoto and all the timestamps and geotags were correct. From there I opened my new iPhoto library with Photos and it made a whole new Photos album and as soon as I used iTunes to sync my photographs to my iPhone 7 everything came in the correct order and I had no problems with any timestamp from the pictures from Thailand or any other album. My pictures are a mix between GoPro, iPhone and Cannon. I hope this does help you.

PS when I tried air dropping the photos as a small test from Photos Mac to my iPhone they were displaying the correct timestamp and geotag.

What is your experience?

The same mess of inconsistent times.

It is the same for libraries migrated from Aperture as for iPhoto.

Photos, that have been imported to iPhoto and Aperture with the time zone setting UTC or GMT are now shown with the timezone CEST.

The sample library above has been migrated from Aperture. The photos have been taken at 8:42 UTC.

Any photo transferred by My Photo Stream will also be time shifted to the current time zone.

This is driving me nuts too.

I occasionally collate images from a number of sources after a trip (timezones or not).

• iPhone = Accurate local time (and position).
• My cameras = Accurate local hour, but occasionally minutes out.
• Colleagues/friends/family camera = Occasionally accurate local hour, definitely minutes out.

So, I spent a lot of time in the Photos, using the image adjust tool to batch adjust hours and minutes so that photos appear correctly in the moments view. Finally all in order, with the time showing the local time of the event. However, sync to my iPhone (via iTunes) and the result is a complete mess.

There even seems to be different ways in which adjusted iPhone pictures and adjusted regular camera pictures are handled by the iOS Photos App.

Also, the iOS Photos App changes the displayed date/time as the phone's date and timezone change. The OS X Photos App does not.

Edit : The timezone information shown above seems to only come from photos imported from Aperture. Nothing from photos imported from iPhone/iPhoto.

This is making me crazy too. I took pictures on my phone which show the correct time that were taken (but when when I go under adjust time and date, it says the wrong time zone - it too is showing my local time zone which would then make the actual time showing wrong). This is a major issue as the photos I took on my camera (where the time zone was set properly) now do not match up. For example:

Nikon Camera Photo: Time 9:23 AM Time Zone Mountain Time

iPhone 6 Photo: Time 9:24 AM Time Zone Eastern Standard Time (but it should say Mountain Time) as it new where the geotag was

As a result, the Nikon photo is showing up 2 hours in the photo sort ahead of the iPhone photo which is a major issue when you're combining lots of photos from different sources.

this needs to be addressed by apple - tell them - https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

LN

I may have accidentally stumbled across the answer to this.

When adjusting photos using "Adjust date and time", FIRST make sure that all the photos are in the correct time zone (using the map). THEN adjust by hour any photos that are incorrect.

I'm not sure why this would make a difference, if any. Any thoughts?

Importing those very same pictures now into Photos, very often (not always) yields in pictures being sorted incorrectly. Although, pictures from different sources have the correct date, they are being sorted based on my home timezone.

Photos will use the time zone of the current system time zone when you import your photos. I always try to import the photos while I am still in the timezone where I took the photos or I change the system time to the timezone set in the camera before importing.

Another problem is that Photos is displaying the names of the timezones incorrectly, so we have no way to check the timezone associated with the capture time stamp. The photo below has been taken in Mexico with the iPhone, the iPhone's time was set to he timezone of Mexico City, the photo has been imported while in Mexico, but Photos is displaying the correct time for Mexico, but with the timezone offset of GMT+1, my home timezone I am currently in.