Capture date changing

[anng17747324]

I have changed the filename of 190 photos in a folder and the capture date for all of them has reverted to today's date whereas they were all taken on different days. Can anyone tell me how do I get back to the original capture date?

Thank you. 

[Jeff A Wright]

Anng17747324, you have posted in the Get Started forum. What Adobe application are you attempting to utilize to view the capture date of your photos?

[anng17747324]

I am using Lightroom Classic on a Macbook Pro. Thanks

[anng17747324]

Also a few of the 190 odd photos have retained the original capture date. So it seems to be random.

[GoldingD]

1. What is your OS?

2. What is your photo naming syntax?

3. Are the photos with the wrong capture date originals or exports

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[anng17747324]

OS is 10.13.6. I name photos eg 2019-06-29-Birthday-party. The photos had been imported into Lightroom and showed the correct date originally. They had been sitting there a couple of years until I re-named them today. And even then the first 10 or so in the folder retained their original capture date. Thank you.

[johnrellis]

Are these images scans or from very old digital cameras?

[GoldingD]

OS is 10.13.6. I name photos eg 2019-06-29-Birthday-party. The photos had been imported into Lightroom and showed the correct date originally. They had been sitting there a couple of years until I re-named them today. And even then the first 10 or so in the folder retained their original capture date. Thank you.

Ahh, a MAC OS , This might be an issue with the OS and how it handles capture date metadata. You might be seeing bad info.

Hopefully another member has some links to share.

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[GoldingD]

Oh, and exactly, what version of Lightroom Classic (version number).

still looking for MAC OS vs capture date vs Lightroom issue. Might have been in this forum, might be version related, something in the back of my head, yells this has come up before.

[anng17747324]

Well that might explain why i have had capture date issues of various types ever since using Lightroom on this computer. It can be infuriating eg when re-dating say 10 photos only a couple are correct and the rest are completely random and sometimes in the future. Thank you for looking for me. Ann

[anng17747324]

Just a further update on this issue which remains unresolved. I got back the original images with the correct capture date by using time machine and have discovered that even if I add a title to the photo, without changing the file name, the capture date also changes to today's date. The original photos were imported to the computer from an iPhone and then imported to Lightroom in a folder. Surely there must be a way of stopping this happening? Any help would be much appreciated, Thank you. Ann George

[johnrellis]

If you provide more details, include whether the photos were scans or from old cameras, I might be able to provide a workaround to make sure this doesn't happen again to other photos in your catalog and possible, and I can recommend how you might recover the original dates.

Also, please do the menu command Help > System Info and report the exact version of LR you're running (the first line).

[anng17747324]

Lightroom Classic version: 8.4 [ 201908011719-03751b60 ]
License: Creative Cloud

Hello

The above is the version I am using. The photos were imported into my computer from a phone. They were then imported into lightroom and sat in a folder with their original image file names from the phone and original dates. It was only when I changed the file names for all of them that the dates changed. Thank you. 

[johnrellis]

Choose one of the photos recovered from Time Machine before you reimport it to LR and upload it to Dropbox or similar and post the sharing link here.   I can take a look at its metadata to see what might be going on.

Over the years, LR has had numerous problems with capture date, including with pics from iPhones, and photos could be imported into catalogs with inconsistent (buggy) capture dates.  The LR fixes typically addressed newly imported photos but not photos already imported into the catalog. 

Looking at a sample pic's metadata could help me recommend a workaround that would fix your catalog.

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[anng17747324]

Here is a link to one of the original photos from Time Machine which was taken sometime during the summer of 2014. As soon as I imported it from the iPhone 5 it took on the date when I did that - 7th December 2014. Then when I import into lightroom and change its filename and/or its title, the date changes to todays date. https://www.dropbox.com/s/27sdbfxvd22mnse/IMG_9882.jpg?dl=0

Any help would be much appreciated as this capture date issues with Lightroom have plagued me for a couple of years now. Many thanks Ann George

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

The photo you uploaded doesn't contain a capture date (or any other fields) in its metadata. LR has never handled this well, despite a couple of attempted bug fixes over the years -- the current version (8.4.1) continues to behave inconsistently. 

Currently, LR will often use the operating system's modified date of the photo's file (the date/time any application modified the file) as the photo's capture date. That modified date can start out the same as the capture date, but can get updated by LR or other apps later.

To fix this inconsistent behavior:

1. Make a backup of your LR catalog file, in case something goes wrong.

2. Do View > View Options to have capture date shown under Library grid view thumbnails.

3. Select some or all photos and do Metadata > Edit Capture Time. Immediately click Change All. That will set the capture dates recorded in the catalog for all the selected photos to those dates shown under the thumbnails. (It does not set all the photos to have the same date.)

Now those photos will have capture dates correctly recorded in the catalog and in their metadata, and those dates won't change when you do things like a rename.

[anng17747324]

Thank you so much for your help. It has been a real help in understanding what is going on with a problem which has been an issue for me since first using lightroom. Your suggestion did work - ie I was able to edit the filename and title without changing the capture date to today's date. However, with the first step you suggested Lightroom still managed to generate a few randome dates which i was able to correct. Many thanks agin. Ann 

[johnrellis]

Glad you were able to make progress on this.