Why does Lightroom Classic keep changing the date of my photos on Import

"all of my pictures are being shot on a canon r5 and I then save them to an external hard drive, and when I check the pictures on th drive the time and date are correct.  The problem occures when I edit them in Lightroom classic.  Always 1 or 2 of the pictures time and/or date stamps get changed."

1. Are these JPEGs or raws? 

2. Where in LR are you observing the capture date change?  

3. If it's in the Metadata panel, what's the precise label of the field?

4. When the date changes, is it changing to "now" (when you make the edit) or something else? 

5. If something else, what are the before and after date/times?

Hi Rodrigo,

Ive had a similar thing, but in my case I found it was due to downloading photos sent to me in WhatsApp. I then put them on a memory card and imported them into Lightroom Classic, but the date always showed as the date I imported them and not the capture date that was clearly shown in the properties of each Photo. Im not sure why Lightroom cant just see the capture date in the properties for each photo, but it cant. I asked a question on the forum but nobody every solved this so when I now import photos that originated from WhatsApp, in the keyword panel for that photo I put in `Date shown is not correct`, and the other thing I do to All imprted photos is put in the date the photo was taken i.e 26th September 2024.

Photos imported from an SD card that originated directly from either of my cameras never present a problem, and the day of capture and time are always correct.

I know that doesnt solve your problem, but at least you know youre not alone!

Kind regards

Steve

Hi Steve, I never received a forum notification of your July 8 reply with the attached photos.  

I examined the metadata from "Dartmout Castle Original.jpg", and it's missing almost all the original camera (EXIF) metadata, including a capture date.  That would be consistent with downloading a photo from social-media apps -- they tend to strip all useful metadata from photos. 

Note that the EXIF capture date is different from the Date Modified and Date Created you see in Windows File Explorer or Mac Finder.  Those are the dates that the operating system or an app created the file or changed it for whatever reason and don't have any necessary relation to the capture date (when the shutter was pressed), which is recorded in EXIF.

LR doesn't handle very well photos that are missing capture dates.  It will use Date Modified or Date Created as a fall-back, but in that case LR does something screwy -- whenever the Date Modified of the file changes, LR will change its displayed capture date to that new Date Modified.  In particular, if you do Metadata > Save Metadata To File, or you have the option Automatically Write Changes Into XMP set, then any time you change keywords, captions, star ratings, etc. or make an edit in Develop, the file's Date Modified changes to "now", and LR will then display that as the new capture date of the photo.

Adobe doesn't acknowledge this as a bug and doesn't really care about it -- it's been this way for years.

A workaround is to select all such photos and do Metadata > Edit Capture Time to set their correct date/time.   After that, LR will handle the photos' capture dates correctly.

Hi JohnRellis,

I`m not sure how I could do that! The problem is the date is correct on photos on my cards prior to import into LRC and when I view them in Bridge, BUT its only after theyr are imported into LRC that the date of photo is changed to the date there imported, so yes the photos I sent with this post were exported from LRC but thats the only way I know of showing the issue, because as I say the originals are OK, its just during the import process, that some, not all, havec their dates changed to todays date! Ive just put on an answer today to another guy above saying I`d been to two events over this last weekend, I took around 1600 photos and they loaded into LRC without the dates getting changed, except I now have another issue in that LRC said `192 photos are missing`, but theyre there on my card and show up in Bridge and Windows Properties show theyre there, so I tried reimporting them and LRC said that theyre still missing. Ive now reimported the JPEG back ups of these missing photos but got a few hours processing today to make sure I have everything before clearing the cards. As I said above I`m not going to take a chance and will throw that card away in case thats become corrupted.

Hi GoldingD,

I `m now out for the rest of the afternoon, but tomorrow I`ll do exactly as you say, Ill take some photos off my DSLR and some off my camera phone and see if I can reproduce it, but as I said previously its totally random, when it does this. For instance yesterday I imported a folder of 1675 photos from a particular shoot and every single one of them imported correctly with the original shoot date. I`ll get back to you after going through your great fault finding suggestion. Cheers and thanks for your help.

You wrote on June 26 that you reported it as a bug, and that Adobe already tried to find out if there is something wrong with your catalog. So what do you expect from reporting it once again as a bug? I strongly suspect it's something on your system however, not a bug in Lightroom Classic. The reason why I suspect that is simple statistics. If Lightroom Classic had a bug like this, there would be lots of people who already reported it. After all, this would affect pretty much every Lightroom Classic user if it were indeed a bug.

Hi ManiacJoe,

Thanks for that and yes I dont make any changes to the EXIF data before importing photos, and this problem occurs randomly to NEF files or JPEG`s generated off my Nikon D500 or D7200, or to JPEG photo files off my old Huawei Mate 20 lite phone or one month old Samsung Galaxy A32 phones. Its frustrating because its so random. But its importent to me to know the exact date photos were taken which is why I`ve reported this as a potential bug. If you look at my comment to Axel Matt above, I`ve had a lot of help from Lightroom Queen in UK trying to resolve this problem. Initially they suggested resetting preferences, but that didnt work, and after other suggestions also didnt work, they got me to send my LRC catalogue over to them and they forwarded it to someone they knew in Adobe Engineering who ran all their tests on my catalogue and the report came back that my catalogue `wasnt corrupted and there was nothing else wrong with the catalogue`. Thats why I`ve now reported this as a potential bug, because I do all my house keeping regularly and back up every time I exit and run Optimisation once a week, even though I know the catalogue is optimised each time you back up. This is just a total mystery now because so many things have been tried.

Hi Matt,

I tried both of those things many months ago, after that suggestion came from Lightroom Queen support in the UK to whom Im a member, neither of them made any differrence, so having also made a number of other suggestions to me, all of which didnt work, Paul from Lightroom Queen got me to send him my LR catalogue. He then sent that over to someone they knew at Adobe and they ran all their tests on it and it came back there was nothing wrong with the catalogue. I do all my regular housekeeping, I back up every time I exit LRC and once a week, even though I know the back up process doess this I also Optimise my catalogue as well. I should say that this problem exists if I run LRC on my Lenovo desktop PC, or my Dell quite high specced laptop that I purchased last year for the sole purpose of running LRC and PS on it. I believe this is an Adobe bug somewhere,because I cant think of anything Im doing wrong or in fact not doing. Its just so frustrating as its so random and doesnt do it to every imported photo.