AirDrop photos iPhone to Mac mini loses creation date

I found the solution. I was misunderstanding where the Inspector in Preview gets that information. It's not the EXIF data that are embedded within the image file itself but the file system created/modified dates.

To get the EXIF data you need to navigate to this tab of the inspector:

I'm amazed that no-one has pointed this out in the last 10 years of people posting similar questions like this.

I don't get the same behaviour as you. On my system, after the airdrop, the file creation date is the date of the airdrop not the date of creation of the original file on the iPhone (see the first screenshot I posted above showing "Today at 09:55").

I wanted to make sure the creation date of the photo was not lost when transferring to my Mac. In the Inspector General Info panel screenshot above "Jan 2, 2026 at 12:38" is not the creation date of the photo. It is the date time when I did the airdrop (i.e. today). The creation date of the photo was November 22, 2025.

What I realized (see my answer above) is that the creation date of the photo can be found in the EXIF panel and is called "Datetime Digitized" or "Datetime Original". That is the correct answer to my question.

But it is interesting that your file creation date preserves the original file creation date, not the date of the airdrop. Probably the bug was fixed in iOS between 15.8.4 and 26.2 or it only occurs on iPhones.

Maybe it's device or OS dependent then. What OS are you using on your iPad?

My phone has iOS 15.8.4 which is not the latest.

Here is a photo from November 22 which I just airdropped to my Mac: