Lightroom: Still inconsistent capture date/time for photos and videos

This is absolutely maddening, especially as I'm trying to migrate from Aperture which can read all the date, camera, and location info on videos just fine (and has for years).

The data is all there, can be read by other competing apps along with utilities like exiftool. Why can't Lightroom do the same?

The bug still exists in LR CC 2015.1 released a couple of days ago. Given that this bug has been present in some form for 4 years now without a resolution is a deal-breaker for me in my quest to find an Aperture replacement.

Not sure why is rocket science for Adobe to acknowledge and fix such an obvious bug. The whole video support is just poorly made

I'm having a similar problem. The dates are correct on my Samsung video camera and files, but when LR imports them, it says they were shot in 1949 (and bizarrely, a day before the actual day they were shot)! I can go into each folder and "Edit capture time" and select "Date file created" to fix the dates, but then I have to drag and drop each file into the correct date folder, because LR sorted them all (upon import) into folders with the wrong dates!

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Sorting by date issues with .mts and .mov files.

The Meta Data of the files look correct, but the sorting is wrong (maybe some creation date problems)

I'm a Mac User on Mac OSX 10.10.4
(you forgot to add a specification on this form!)

After months of waiting if not for a solution that at least for a reaction from Adobe I decided NOT TO USE LR for any video-oriented purposes, it seems the video features are pure marketing, sadly.

This bug also happens for photos when there is no DateTimeOriginal but there is an EXIF:ModifyDate, e.g. with a scan that's been edited by an app but doesn't have a capture date.

As an example, here are the relevant metadata date fields for a sample TIF:


$ exiftool -a -G sample.tif | grep -i date
[File] File Modification Date/Time : 2015:08:22 12:25:20-07:00
[File] File Access Date/Time : 2015:08:22 12:25:22-07:00
[File] File Inode Change Date/Time : 2015:08:22 12:25:20-07:00
[EXIF] Modify Date : 2015:08:21 21:02:27
[ICC_Profile] Profile Date Time : 1998:02:09 06:49:00


And here's a screen shot showing that the date under the thumbnail shows the operating system's file modified date, while the Metadata panel shows the capture time as the EXIF:ModifyDate:

I have this problem too. My photo was taken on my iphone using a different app and the photo didn't record an Exif capture time. However, it must detect it somehow as the capture time is correct in the metadata tab. The end result is that even though the capture time is correct, it doesn't sort by capture time correctly. The photos that reproduce this are here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vmanuyx80y...

There, the middle photo doesn't sort correctly even though the metadata shown in the metadata tab looks correct.

My light room version is 5.7.1 build number 994254

Another inconsistency (observed in LR CC 2015.3) for photos missing a capture date in their metadata: The metadata panel shows a capture date, but the Date column for the filter bar shows "Unknown".

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom 5.7 Rename feature applying incorrect Capture time when Renaming video ....

The rename functionality within Lightroom 5.7 ( “Menu>Library>Rename Photo”) is broken when renaming video files using filename templates that contain the “Date” tags. This is only an issue with rename as the problem doesn’t occur during the initial import of the video files into the catalog using the exact same template. The problem appears to only affect video files and not my RAW or JPEG files.

My filename template contains a “Custom Text” tag followed by the capture date. For example:
5diii.November 21, 2015-18.05.35.MOV

Rather than use the capture time the bug in the rename functionality pushes the file’s name 6 hours into the future. This is what led me to uncover the problem as a directory from 21st of the month contained files named as if they’d been shot on the 22nd...

As noted the initial import works just fine so as a test I removed one of the affected video file from my library, moved it to another part of the disk, and then re-import the file. Upon doing this the file’s name correctly reflected the capture time. (Note I had to move the file because the import dialog hides the rename option if the file is in the same path it’s going to be imported into – could be annoying for some).

See the included screen captures for details of what I've said here.

While the above workaround is a viable it’s a very painful one as my custom tag is based on my camera model. To preserve that I had to isolate all my video files by model and re-import each separately applying the correct custom tag to my template. Under Windows 10 this isn’t too big a deal using both search and copy, but it still took a good hour and was only made easier by the fact that, unlike my still images, all my video images are in a single catalog. That said the catalog spans 10 years and includes ~2500 files. In that time my wife and I have used 7 different cameras and 5 different smartphones which is what made it a pain.

I happen to in UTC-6, but changing my timezone on my PC doesn’t seem to affect the problem and even then I’d expect the value to be 6 hours in the past and not 6 hours in the future - unless an absolute value is being applied. That said I have no idea if LR is determining my time zone from my IP address and not looking at the system time but I’d be surprised if that were the case so this is probably just a coincidence.

Finally, I’ve only had to rename files in my video catalog if I forgot to set the “Custom Text” for the camera model. Not doing so defaults the custom text to ‘untitled’. It would be nice if LR threw an warning if this was the case as I doubt most people intend their file names to contain untitled. IF possible I could see this being an optional setting ("Warn custom tag not specified") stored on the template that is set to true by default, otherwise a global catalog setting would be nice.

On a related note once an instance of LR has been used to perform an import the custom text is retained until LR is restarted. While a nice feature, this has caused me to accidentally apply custom text for the wrong camera if I import from multiple sources in one session and forget to change the custom tag. A similar option warning would be nice (i.e. “Warn custom tag when changing source”)

The video in question as it appears in my catalog alongside file system details from Windows 10:


The video in question re-imported with the correct date along side the incorrectly named one. Note that I brought up the rename dialog on the correctly named file and the preview shows the name reflecting the 6 hour shift:

I just noticed my topic/bug was merged into this one. I feel this was done in error as my issue is specific to how LR is applying a file rename template. It's possible whoever did this only read my topics title and mistook my issue to be related to this thread.

As noted in my topic and the screenshots I linked, the capture time LR displays is correct. How it uses that time to generate my filename per my rename template is not. If the rename is performed at import it is correct (with the exception of MTS files) but if I apply a rename AFTER the import it shifts all my file names by 6 hours. The capture time remains correct.

To whoever merged my topic please undo this or. I specifically chose not to merge it into this topic as my problem is not the same as that as the OP's. I don't want my information pertaining to the rename functionality to be overlooked as I feel it offers some clues as to where the rename issue resides (i.e. works during import - for at least mov/avi files, fails for MTS - fails on subsequent renames). As a developer myself I know those sorts of clues could be very valuable. It took nearly 2 hours of testing to gather the details in my post and I now its been merged into a mostly unrelated thread where the information may get overlooked (especially given the age of this thread).

As you can see below the file reports a capture time of 6:05 PM. This is the correct capture time (it's dusk outside not midnight). What is incorrect is how LR chose to apply said capture time to the file rename template which generated a time 6 hours in the future. This issue was consistent across my entire catalog and always +6 hours off. As noted my workaround was to re-import my catalog and the problem went away for all but MTS files.


as you can see in the file system details (as posted in my org post) the capt time is correct. my issue is not related to OP; please unmerge

The core issue is that LR doesn't have a single internal field that it uses consistently for capture time. This results in inconsistencies in a number of different places in the application: sorting, filtering, metadata display, renaming. But they all have the same root cause, the failure of the implementation to have an abstraction that provides a consistent value for "capture time".

The inconsistencies occur more often with video than with images, most likely because Adobe admitted in this forum that they never finished video metadata due to other priorities.

Gathering all of these inconsistencies in a single topic will make it more likely that Adobe will notice and address the core issue rather than apply incomplete baind-aids (as did once before).

I confirmed that for .mov (QuickTime) files produced by iOS 9, the Library > Rename Photo command is showing a similar inconsistency as the other use cases in this topic. In particular, the rename command is using the file system's modification date as "capture time", whereas the Metadata panel and the thumbnail use the QuickTime metadata field "Create Date" as the "capture time".

As an example, I used this renaming template:



to rename a .mov file. The new filename 2016-01-16--22-20-31.MOV corresponds to the file system's modification date. Whereas the date under the thumbnail and in the Metadata panel corresponds to the QuickTime metadata field Create Date:





The capture time shown under the thumbnail and in the Metadata panel is 8 hours after the local time at which the video was taken. (My computer is running in UTC-8.) This shift is due to a different bug in which LR trips over QuickTime's lack of time zones in some date/time metadata fields: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh....

Hi John,
How can I (or others) help gather info into one spot?
I always appreciate your help & insight!

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled New variant of Capture time bug.

I know this has been a long running issue, but the latest release has changed the behaviour of Capture Date and Time for the worse

Sequence of events:
1. Import scanned image without any metadata in the Capture Date/Time Fields
2. Copy Metadata from existing image including those fields
3. Paste into the newly imported image
4. Select a folder containing the image, sorted by capture time

Previous version (numbers refer to above steps):
1. Capture date/time not shown in right column
3. Capture date time shown as pasted values
4. Image appears according to displayed date/time

Current version:
1. Capture date/time not shown in right column
3. Capture date time shown as pasted values
4. Image appears according to create/import time (I can't determine which) rather than displayed values

Now this can be fixed on the image by opening the Metadata edit capture time dialog and selecting change.

This places image in the correct place in the sequence but is yet another pointless step I have to add to my workflow.