[hackeman300]

If you manually edit the date on a photo, is that also stored separately from the image file itself? Wondering because I've noticed photos I've backed up to Immich from iOS photos don't respect that edited date and reflect whatever the original date was.

I've been thinking about looking into a fix for this since it's bugged me a bit.

[gerdemb]

Yes — in Apple Photos the manually edited date/time is not written back into the image or video file. It’s stored separately in the Photos library database, which is why tools like Immich usually fall back to the original capture date in EXIF / QuickTime metadata.

Photos Backup Anywhere does handle this case: it reads the adjusted date from the Photos library and stores that modified timestamp in its own SQLite database, linked to the backed-up file, so the edited date isn’t lost even though the file itself isn’t rewritten.

[hackeman300]

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it. Does Apple provide any APIs for interacting with this metadata or was this something you had to implement yourself with lower level DB lookups?