Help: Incorrect Dates for iPhone Photos - Correct in iOS/Google Photos, but Wrong in Immich
Hi everyone,
I'm stuck on a strange timeline issue with about 1000 assets from my iPhone (mixed JPG, PNG, MOV) that get the wrong date in Immich.
The paradox: The timeline for these exact same files is perfectly correct inside the native iOS Photos App and also in Google Photos.
What I've tried:
A direct backup from the Immich iOS app -> Fails for these ~1000 files.
A full Google Takeout migration using the google-photos-exif community guide -> Also fails for the same files.
Key Finding:
After extensive troubleshooting, I've found that the problematic files land on my server without any EXIF date tags. It seems the correct date information, which Apple and Google can clearly see, is lost during any kind of export or sync process (e.g., Google Takeout doesn't provide a .json for them).
My Questions:
How can Apple/Google correctly date these files if standard EXIF data is missing? What non-standard metadata might they be using?
Is there a recommended tool or method to extract this "hidden" date and write it into the files before importing to Immich?
As a fallback, is there a tool that can reliably write dates based on filenames (e.g., Screenshot_YYYY-MM-DD.png)?
My setup is the latest Immich via Docker on an Ubuntu Server with an NFS library.
Thanks for any ideas!
9 Replies
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Successfully submitted, a tag has been added to inform contributors. :white_check_mark:I think you can use the exiftool for that.
Have you tried immich-go?
Yes, but it didn‘t work
I haven't tried immich-go yet, but I followed the community guide for Google Photos import + albums using mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif, exiftool, and ffmpeg.
Immich sort the photos on these tags in the Metadata.
If you have photos and videos received via WhatsApp, they often contain tags and are probably organized by the file creation date. What I did was move all the photos that didn’t have the correct creation date into a separate folder. Then, I used ExifTool to update the creation date based on the file’s creation date. It was quite a hassle
I also tried to update the data with exiftool, however, I just applied it to all the files. The overall process is very time-consuming and difficult. I'll give the immich-go tool a try; maybe that will work better. I have no desire to manually adjust over 1000 photos, haha.
Also, I have now selected the 50GB zip file in Google Takeout to download. I think that simplifies things a bit more. Before that, I had 25 2GB zip files.
With immich go you can upload all the zip files in 1 one go. If you use de ....zip in the command all the zips will be processed
immich-go upload from-google-photos --server=http://your-ip:2283 --api-key=your-api-key --manage-raw-jpeg=StackCoverRaw /path/to/your/takeout-.zip
Yes, that's true, but on GitHub, under 'Google Photos Best Practices', it says:
Taking Out Your Photos:
Choose the ZIP format when creating your takeout for easier import.
Select the largest file size available (50GB) to minimize the number of archive parts.
Download all parts to your computer.