Created date/time imported from HEIC incorrect

Richard

This may or may not be to do with HEIC

I am running Windows 11 (in the UK time zone) and the latest Tonfotos

In my HEIC metadata I have:
Modify date 2025:07:17 09:36:14
DateTimeOriginal 2025:07:17 09:36:14
CreateDate 2025:07:17 09:36:14
OffsetTime -07:00
OffsetTimeOriginal -07:00
OffsetTimeDigitized -07:00
GPS Date/Time 2025:07:17 16:36:8.88 UTC
after import I see:
Created: 17/07/2025 17:36:14
Modified: 17/07/2025 09:36:14

… it looks like the Created hour is wrong, but I can’t see a pattern

For JPG, it seems to be picking up the Created date from DateTimeOriginal or CreateDate correctly (and ignoring OffsetTime, which I think is probably the best behaviour).

Richard

OK - I can see what is happening. The Created date is being adjusted for time zone, but the Modified date is not, which is inconsistent but not particularly problematic. My problem is really that my jpg files do not have the OffsetTime embedded, so they end up hours out of sync with the HEIC files. I’m not sure there is a good solution to that, other than adjusting the dates on all the jpg files.

Andrey

Richard The dates problem is very complicated. Tonfotos has special logic to determine what date to use as creation date out of all possible dates stored in metadata. It looks like it does good job in your case.

However, modified date is usually not even taken from metadata, it can be to date from file attribute. Image might be modified in some applicaiton, but not necessary that application cared enough to update modification date in metadata.

It looks like whatever applicaiton you used to convert HEIC to JPEG did damage your metadata by discarding offset information. That is not good. I believe now the best way would be to use Tonfotos F3 function to adjust to correct timezone, that should solve the problem. In the future please consider using better software to convert files, one that does not damage metadata. Tonfotos can be one of the options.

Richard

Many thanks, I understand what is going on again now and agree that the current Tonfotos approach is indeed the best under the circumstances. My jpeg files are directly from the camera (heic files are from an iphone), so there seems to be no hope of getting the time zone from the source. I’ll use F3 as you suggest.

Tony

I’m having a similar problem and have yet to find a solution. Software provided by Network Attached Storage device backsup photos from my cellphone to the NAS. But somewhere the creation date and modified date are changed to date of upload, so photos from the past are date stamped as today and my sort order is incorrect. It’s not TonFotos but the backup software which maybe is changing dates so it knows what it has backed up and what it hasn’t.