Downloading pictures from iCloud how can I keep original time stamp.

I tried everything as I had;

4,000+ photos on an old Icloud back up

and 1,770 photos on my phone

The best AND ONLY way I found was to

Use airdrop from my phone to my mac

First I transferred all my iphone pic's a a folder on my mac - 1770 took about 20 mins

Then i deleted these from my phone

Then in settings I activated icloud library and download and keep originals

All pictures were then back on my phone

I then repeated the Airdrop process and YEAH.. ALL photo's are now on my mac with all the original date data etc

Syncing of images does not change the "taken" time stamp. The "added to" time stamp varies on when the image was added to your library.

You can confirm this by selecting the photo, then doing Get Info (Command+I).

Hi all, when downloading pictures from my iCloud to my Mac is there a way of keeping original time stamp?

Are you using the web interface at www.icloud.com to download the photos?

This interface will save the items with a file creation date of the moment of the download. There is no way to change this behavior. But if you are not using the web interface, but Photos on a Mac, the original file creation date should be preserved, if you export the photos and videos with "File > Export > Export unmodified original ..". Photos is trying to preserve the file creation date unchanged for the original files. Is that not happening? We have seen a few bug reports, that syncing with iCloud Photo Library changed the original creation date for the original master image files and videos.

It is safer to rely on the embedded "IPTC Date Created" metadata tag than on the file attributes as Rysz pointed out.

If you have photos without an embedded capture date tag (scans or screenshots, videos), where you want to preserve the original time stamp, add the date&time to the filename before importing the files to Photos and uploading to iCloud. Once the photo is in Photos you can also use the command "Image > Adjust Date and Time" to add a capture date tag to the photo. Then the correct date metadata tags will sync with iCloud.