[MEGATHREAD] Date/time/timezone issues

[jrasm91]

As everyone should know by now, photo and video metadata is a bit of a mess. On top of that, we're also now talking about timezones. Long story short, we know there will always be room for improvement in this area.

If you have an issue with:

• Photo or video showing up in the wrong place in the timeline
• Photo or video with the wrong date day, time, or timezone
• Photos or videos taken at the same time not showing up next to each other

Please post a comment in this discussion with the following, and we will happily investigate the issue.

• a zip of your file
• the expected date, including timezone
• current date produced by immich

[mmomjian]

Can we also ask people to include their .env with the TZ variable and the output of date both on the host and in the immich_server container?

[jrasm91]

Even without it I will be able to tell if it will fallback to a default timezone or not, so it doesn't really matter IMO.

[ygaeon]

Adding my old issue #9331 to here ... (no need to duplicate info, right?)

1. Not a zip-file but a link to the uploaded asset in the linked issue IMG_20240504_164142.jpg
2. 2024-05-04 16:41:42 +0200 (CET)
3. 05/04/2024, 06:41 PM (18:41) Africa/Blantyre (+02:00)

[jrasm91]

You post is quite large actually. Can you post exactly:

1. Zip file with bad asset
2. Expected day, time, + timezone
3. Current day, time, + timezone shown in immich

[ygaeon]

Updated my comment..

[jrasm91]

So this photo has no time zone information in at it all. From the exif we get:

{
  "SubSecDateTimeOriginal": "2024:06:05 00:20:20.979349",
  "DateTimeOriginal": "2024:06:05 00:20:20",
  "CreateDate": "2024:06:05 00:20:20"
}

I would expect it to:

• Show under the June 5th header in the timeline
• Display as 12:20am on June 5th in the detail panel and without a timezone

It looks like the second point isn't happening because it is displaying it using the viewer's timezone. I'll make a PR to change that.

[jrasm91]

The second point should be addressed with #12779

[malkavi]

Hi, I also have a lot of photos misplaced in my timeline. Those photos are old photos from external libraries.
I think the problem may be related to the lack of some metadata field (date:create and date:modify). And when importing immich modifies the files by creating those fields (??).
Maybe is my fault, I moved some folders to a new structure and lost the file creating date... Not sure. Move date can be the fake date.

Some photos from Google Takeout does not have any useful metadata.

IMG_20130913_081540.JPG:
Real date: 13/09/2013
Fake: 08/07/2024

PANO_20170416_105856.jpg:
Real date 16/April/2017
Fake date 08/July/2024

Metadata:
date:create: 2024-07-08T18:55:36+00:00
date:modify: 2024-07-08T18:55:36+00:00
exif:DateTime: 2017:04:16 10:58:56
exif:ExifOffset: 82
exif:GPSDateStamp: 2017:04:16

CameraZOOM-20150715115510237.jpg:
Real: 15/072015
Fake: 08/07/2024
Metadata:
date:create: 2024-07-08T18:54:40+00:00
date:modify: 2024-07-08T18:54:40+00:00
exif:DateTime: 2015:07:15 11:55:35

IMG_20151222_135145.vr.jpg:
Real: 22/122015
Fake: 08/07/2024
date:create: 2024-07-08T18:54:37+00:00
date:modify: 2024-07-08T18:54:37+00:00
exif:ColorSpace: 1
exif:DateTime: 2015:12:22 13:52:19
immich_malkavi_20240917.zip

[radh21301]

Hey. I think this thread is about things showing up in the wrong place when the images have metadata.

Yours is borked up because of google and has no metadata. I would try to fix that first. Some options:

• Use immich-go for takeout files. it is the one recommended by this community
• OR fix the metadata/date yourself - looks like all the names of the images have the date and time attached to it. So, you can use exiftool fort this..something like this:
  exiftool "-alldates<filename" -P ./
  Please research into exiftool before you do anything.