Dates wrong when importing from IPhone to LR Classic

[EliseL]

Every few months I use a USB cable and the LR import dialogue to import photos from my IPhone into LR Classic. Recently, the thumbnails in the Import dialogue are not sorted by capture time, even though Capture Time is checked. In addition, it shows all photos though I have checked New Photos at the top. Since I import every few months, I need them in order so I can go back to the last import date and only import from there forward.

It seems like the phone is randomly redating the photos. They used to be somewhat out of order, but not this bad.

1. Any ideas what's going on or how to fix this?

2. What's another way to easily and safely transfer photos from my phone to LR CLassic?

Thanks!

[johnrellis]

@joeg88617122, please add your constructive opinion to the bug report about the current issue, which Adobe has acknowledged:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-import-seems-to-misinterpret-exif-date-time/...

and be sure to click the Upvote button at the top-right and Follow at the bottom of the first post. That will make it a little more likely Adobe will prioritize the fix, and you'll be notified when the bug's status changes.

There have been long-standing, unfixed bugs over the years with dates and importing via USB cable. I believe that feature depends both on Mac OS and LR, and importing via USB cable doesn't appear to be a priority for either company -- they're focused on cloud solutions.

[KunaBob]

Hi John. I have been reporting this exact same issue to community support at: "P: Import seems to misinterpret EXIF date time". Apparently Adobe thinks it's fixed, but as I can see from the posts here, it is definitely not. I was told that Adobe has marked this 'fixed' and that nothing else would be done. Please advise as this problem has nearly destroyed my iPhone workflow!! Thanks, Bob

[ninskij15348687]

I've been having the same issue since last summer. Very frustrating- and when I have asked Apple and Adobe call centers about this, they act like it's a new thing and fumble their way through testing it out. It seems this has long been an issue. It makes Lightroom useless. This problem was always an issue with Photos, so i moved over to Lightroom. Very annoyed with these companies.

[joeg88617122]

I am trying to use bridge right now but I cannot find a way to prevent dupicates from importing. At this point I have imported my full library 3 times to the drive! Photos is useless beuase it hides the orioginal file location.  I just want my iphone memmories preserved in order without using the cloud. Let me know if you find any software capable of doing that in one step. I will do the same.

[TheGremlin]

The only way I've been able to get around this, and it works most of the time is to use WiFi transfer on the iOS device and copy the images to a drive on my machine, then import them to light room from there. I've had this fail sometimes but for the most part it seems to actually put them in the correct place. 

I really don't understand what prevents Adobe from fixing this, even if they had to check after a file was written that it was from an iOS device and then double check the date and the location they're placed. I name my files with the date they were taken along with putting them into a directory of date (i.e. \2022\November\2022-11-04 17-49-05 iPhone 13 Pro Img_1234.HEIC is a sample file name. When I import from the phone and the image is put in the wrong folder the file name is correct, so it does know the correct date, it just uses the wrong one for the folder, so this is a bug somewhere in their flow plain and simple.

[joeg88617122]

The issue with Image Capture is that you do not get the live photo files. I found a paid program called iMazing 2 that allows me to select photos individually or by date range. It also will transfer the live photo files.  The program is pretty handy in general for pulling idividual files off of a phone such as voice mail message etc.  I still have to import all photos to a seprate folder before then importing into lightroom which is utterly ridiculous and disapointing on Adobe's part.

[rbatey]

I use AirDrop to import the photos from Photos app to my iMac over wifi. They automatically go to the Downloads folder. From there I manually move them to the appropriately dated folders on an external drive. From there I import to LR Classic. When I do it that way, the creation dates are correct, the order of the files is correct, and it even transfers any captions and edits you applied in Photos app (which are removed when importing by USB). LR's import interface is incredibly slow, so this seemingly clunky workaround actually ends up being faster.