How to copy photos to Android from PC with correct date?

[M_W]

Just got an S8 and am in the process of transferring everything over from my iPhone 5S. I've hit a snag on pictures, and a quick Google search reveals I'm not the only one. The issue I'm having is that the transferred pictures and videos aren't sorted by the date taken. I found some solutions out there, and one that I tried is to cut and paste (move) the files over USB instead of copying. This preserved the date on some files, but not all. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to it either. I've also tried the "Fix date" feature from QuickPic, but that didn't change anything.

When I view the files on the S8 from Windows Explorer, they show up in exactly the right order, but when viewing them on the device, it's all messed up. This would seem to indicate that the correct date is there, but Android refuses to sort by it.

I knew there would be some issues to iron out when making the switch to Android, but never did I imagine anything like this. It's absolutely ridiculous. I'm pretty frustrated with it at this point to say the least.

The fact that only some of the files get their dates messed up is what I'm stuck at. I'm able to edit the dates manually with an EXIF editor app, but that would be a wasted afternoon to go and edit them all.

ANY help would be appreciated here. Windows 7 is what I've used to do all the transferring, but I do have Ubuntu as well. The phone is a factory unlocked Galaxy S8 running Android 7.0.

Thanks!

UPDATE:
Apparently the EXIF info for some of my pictures was indeed messed up, so I was able to fix those with exiftool. However, my videos are still getting their dates reset. I've changed all the date fields for them in exiftool, but no matter what I do they just get reset when I copy them over.

One thing I discovered is that if I take a video on the phone, copy it to the PC, delete it from the phone, and copy it back, the date is preserved as it's supposed to do. This is making me think that there's some date field in the video that exiftool can't see.

 

[ManiacJoe]

The dates on the file system are controlled by the file system (date file created, date file modified). This has nothing to do with the dates related to the capture time of the image and the edit time of the image, which are stored in the EXIF data of the image.

Many image viewing apps wrongly look at the file dates when they should be looking at the EXIF data. If your image viewer is doing it wrong, try another. "Piktures" by Diune gets it right.

Windows File Explorer will read the EXIF data, so the image dates are available for sorting as well as the file dates. As a rule, Mac Finder does not do it correctly.

How does your camera app name the files on your phone? The LG phones use the creation date and time as the name, so sorting by name is the same as sorting by image capture date.

 

[M_W]

The dates on the file system are controlled by the file system (date file created, date file modified). This has nothing to do with the dates related to the capture time of the image and the edit time of the image, which are stored in the EXIF data of the image.

Many image viewing apps wrongly look at the file dates when they should be looking at the EXIF data. If your image viewer is doing it wrong, try another. "Piktures" by Diune gets it right.

Windows File Explorer will read the EXIF data, so the image dates are available for sorting as well as the file dates. As a rule, Mac Finder does not do it correctly.

How does your camera app name the files on your phone? The LG phones use the creation date and time as the name, so sorting by name is the same as sorting by image capture date.

Piktures is sorting them the same as my regular Gallery app. The camera on the S8 does name them by date, but sorting by name wouldn't work for downloaded images and things.

Just tried the zip archive method, but that still messes up only some of the images. It's almost like the metadata in those images is messed up or something... but Windows has no problems reading it. I might have to fire up that EXIF editor this afternoon after all. :-\

 

[M_W]

Apparently the EXIF info for some of my pictures was indeed messed up, so I was able to fix those with exiftool. However, my videos are still getting their dates reset. I've changed all the date fields for them in exiftool, but no matter what I do they just get reset when I copy them over.

One thing I discovered is that if I take a video on the phone, copy it to the PC, delete it from the phone, and copy it back, the date is preserved as it's supposed to do. This is making me think that there's some date field in the video that exiftool can't see.

Does anyone know of a way to preserve the video dates?

 

[ManiacJoe]

Yah, files downloaded from the internet often have the EXIF data removed.

Lots of apps and programs (phone and computer) have hiccups reading the EXIF data from videos.

 

[M_W]

Guys! I figured out a solution/workaround for this. Although a tedious process, it does work (only tested on my S8). If you have a large collection of videos, you'd probably be better off with a bulk rename utility and naming the files by date and sorting your gallery by name, as this took about an hour to fix just 10 videos. I did this with Ubuntu Linux, but I imagine that it would work the same on Windows.

There is probably a more efficient way to do this, but I only had 10 videos so it wasn't too bad. This is also assuming that you have the date of the video somewhere, be it in the exif data or file name. Mine was there in the exif modify date, but the phone didn't want to read it. Also, this may or may not preserve the dates if you have to copy these videos to a new phone again in a couple of years. As I said in my previous post, only videos taken with the phone would have their dates preserved when copied back from a PC, even though exiftool was showing the proper dates. I read somewhere that Android 8 fixes the way file info like this is read, so some of these steps are optional and are only there to possibly try and future proof the files.

Here are the steps:

1. Manually set the date and time on your phone to the date and time of your video.

2. (Optional) Open up your camera app and take just a 1 second video. This is so we can get a file that has all the exif date fields filled out with the right date. This process will still work if you don't do this step, but this is just a precaution to make sure all the fields are filled out in hopes that Android 8 will read the data properly.

3. Copy the taken video to your PC, then run "exiftool -tagsfromfile takenvideo.mp4 video.mp4", of course replacing these video names here with the actual names of your videos.

4. Zip your video into an archive file and copy it back to your phone. (It still works if you just copy the file back to your phone directly, but the created date will get changed. Putting the video in a zip file just ensures that none of the fields are changed when copying.)

5. Unzip the file on your phone, and voila! You can run exiftool -s on the file to make sure that all the date fields are correct (they were in my case).

Repeat for each video.

Like I said, I'm sure there's a better way of doing this, and I might be wrong about a few things here, but the main point is that you need to change the date on your phone when copying the files over. I hope this long winded "guide" of sorts will be of help to someone.

 

[Rukbat]

You could copy all the files, then make a bash script to run exiftool on each file, then zip them all up. The copying to the PC and back and the unzipping would still be manual, but wouldn't take much time on the keyboard, but the actual change on the file would be done automatically. (And you could do the same thing on the phone with a terminal app to run exiftool on all the files.)

Or just use File Timestamp [root] on the phone if it's rooted.

 

[gtdevo]

You could copy all the files, then make a bash script to run exiftool on each file, then zip them all up. The copying to the PC and back and the unzipping would still be manual, but wouldn't take much time on the keyboard, but the actual change on the file would be done automatically. (And you could do the same thing on the phone with a terminal app to run exiftool on all the files.)

Or just use File Timestamp [root] on the phone if it's rooted.

I'm having the same problems. I've managed to use Exiftool on the PC to change the Date Taken of all my images to be the same as the Date Modified before copying them all across to android and this works in that the modified and date taken dates remain and so the order is correct on android.

But with .mp4 files it is not working, it seems android uses the creation date for .mp4s as that changes as soon as I copy them across.

How do you run exiftool ON the android mobile to make the change after you have copied across?
and if you are able to zip the .mp4 files before copying across and then unzip on the mobile, will the creation date stay intact? if so, then why would you need to run exiftool on the mobile after?

thanks, Android is non-rooted.

 

[gtdevo]

I tried zipping up the files then transferring to android then unzipping using ES File Explorer and also tried again unzipping using MyFiles, but both times the .mp4 files still change the create date after unzipping.

So how do you run exiftool on the android mobile files after you've copied them across?

It seems that all the steps outlined above are redundant, other than the first one of manually changing the time on the phone before you copy each individual .mp4 file across so that the create date changes to the time you set the phone too??

I haven't tried that yet, I will now, but I am assuming that works as you described.

Otherwise:
- how do you "run exiftool -s on the file to make sure that all the date fields are correct" on the files on the mobile? (when you can't access a drive letter for the mobile on the PC, as it is MTP)
- how do you "do the same thing on the phone with a terminal app to run exiftool on all the files."?