so apple will show 2003 or 2005 (and conflicting modify date) original shoot dates in some of the examples above, but LR will not recognize them and changes the date to a modified date?
Welcome to photo date hell. Let's walk through an example.
Using a utility, I changed the file-created and file-modified dates of seafood.jpg to 4/1/2003 01:23:45 AM:
Normally, Finder will show the metadata capture date for Content Created, but when the file is missing a metadata capture date (as seafood.jpg is), Finder appears to use the file-created date for Content Created.
After importing seafood.jpg into LR, it shows the capture date as 4/1/2003 01:23:45 AM:
Since the file doesn't contain a metadata capture date, LR has used the file-modified date for the capture date.
Next, in LR I do Metadata > Save Metadata To File, causing LR to update the file and the operating-system to change the file-modified date to "now":
The file-created date remains 4/1/2003 1:23:45 AM, and thus Finder still shows that as the Content Created date too. (Note that in some circumstances, when LR "modifies" a file, it actually deletes the old version and creates a brand new one, in which case both the file-created and the file-modified dates get set to "now".)
Since the file-modified date has changed, LR immediately changes its capture date to the new file-modified date:
In you screenshots above, you show seafood.jpg on the iPhone with a date of 4/11/2005, while in Finder its dates are 4/10/2021. I don't know the exact sequence of events or how precisely it was "synced from the Mac", but it's possible that originally the copy on the Mac had file dates of 4/11/2005, the file was copied to the iPhone, and later LR or another program changed its file-created and file-modified dates to 4/10/2021.
Also does not answer why different pictures in the same folder that have meta info some were changed and some were not??
There are a few possibilities:
- If LR did Metadata > Save Metadata To File on some files and not others, or if you have the option Automatically Write Changes To XMP set and you modified metadata of some files but not others, then LR will show the new file-modified dates as the capture date for those files with changed metadata.
- Perhaps at some point you did Metadata > Edit Capture Time on some of the files and not others. As explained in the post I linked to, Edit Capture Time causes LR to get a consistent capture date in its catalog, and it will stop using the ever-changing file-modified date.
- Perhaps some of the photos were imported into LR much earlier than the others. I can't recall the exact version history of LR, but a year or two or three ago, in a failed attempt to fix all these bugs, LR changed to its current behavior. Prior to that, Lr would permanently record the contemporaneous file-modified date as its capture date, at the time of import. If the file was subsequently modified, LR would not update its capture date (as it does now).
* * *
You could try to reconstruct all the tangled history. But the rules going forward:
- After importing photos missing capture date in their metadata, immediately select all of them and do Metadata > Edit Capture Time, Change All. This does
not change them all to have the same date; rather, it causes LR to record capture date for those photos consistently and stop using the ever-changing file-modified date as its captured date.
- For existing photos, also use Edit Capture Time, Change All, though you have to be more careful in doing batches of photos and check the results after each batch (because of the tangled history of what past versions of LR have done to your catalog).