iphone / mac photo sync incorrect date

I don’t use icloud for photos, i prefer to download photos from our iphones to the mac, edit, place into albums etc. then using finder sync mac photos/albums back to the phones, this works a treat for us, however i have bumped into an issue that I have read other people suffer from, i’ve tried a few of the suggestions but still no luck, is there a resolution?

here’s the issue.

some of the photos I originally synched from the mac to phones had incorrect dates, i.e. the date I scanned them, so I adjusted the dates & all was good on the mac, all back in chronological order, however i cannot get the adjusted “date” to sync back to the phones, the date on the same photo on the IOS device remains the original scanned date no matter what i do.

p.s. I have also read this can happen with icloud synched photos.

here’s what i have tried:

updated / restarted mac & phones
mac & iphone physically connected.
on the mac finder i removed the album from the photo sync then completed a sync noting the album & photo no longer appeared on the iphone, now i restarted all devices, next in finder i re-added the album to photo sync & again complete the sync, this time verifying the album was now back on the iPhone, however this made no difference, the photo on the iphone still contains the un-modified date.
if i airdrop the same photo from mac to iphone the modified date is correctly shown on the iphone, so its definitely the sync causing this.

see examples below.

Macbook Ventura 13.7.8

original scanned date is highlighted, the new adjusted date is what I expect to appear on the iphone after a photo sync.

iphone 12 pro IOS 18.7.1

using the “i” button I can see the date/time reflects the original scanned date/ time & not the adjusted mac date.

thanks in advance for any help.

Mark.

iPhone 12 Pro

Posted on Oct 27, 2025 1:25 PM

Top-ranking reply

appletastic45 Author

Level 1

8 points

Posted on Oct 28, 2025 12:26 PM

Hi Richard & thanks for taking the time to reply, let me start by saying I have fixed the issue & I will come back to that.

to answer your questions, yes iCloud is probably the way Apple want people to go but I didn’t want to get addicted to that drug, I wanted more control over my photo organisation (albums) & sync to IOS devices, plus from old experience when your cellular signal is poor & your desperately trying to grab a

photo it can be annoying.

anyway the mac finder app & cable sync are supported methods so why shouldn’t Apple make it work but your also correct it doesn’t push the unmodified original, there is some loss but not too bad.

….anyway to the fix, after some reading i came across an app called “a better finder attributes 7” which will write over the photos original date & is passed in the sync to the IOS devices, my iPhone photos are now appearing in chronological order.

Mark.

View in context

16 replies

léonie

Level 10

200,381 points

Oct 30, 2025 1:56 AM in response to appletastic45

As a Linux admin - have you been trying to use the open source Linux apps on your Mac? I like Gimp and digiKam, but stopped using them after I switched to iCloud.

iphone / mac photo sync incorrect date