Giving up on Photos for iPad

I have had it with Photos for iPad - and I am really upset to have to write that as in so many ways an iPad is a fantastic device for viewing and adjusting photos. But unless you live entirely the iPhone photos life style, which I don’t, it isn’t the device to import and manage images from other cameras if you care about time and place.

Apart from the unnecessarily crippled version of Photos (no curves, levels, selective colour adjustment etc - although you can get these through other apps), the real problem is that Photos overwrites the date/time of a photo imported from a camera or SD card with the date of import. The stupid thing is that the import dialogue shows the date correctly. However, the moment the image is imported all this is forgotten and replaced with the date/time of the import.

Does this matter? For some people, I guess not. But if you actually want a photo record of where you were and what you did it is important to have the right date. In addition, if you use geotagging software, having the wrong date and time kyboshes geotagging.

Unless I alter the Photos metadata for each image individually using Metapho, and life is too short for that, I can see no option but to bin the iPad and return to the Mac. Fortunately, my wife doesn’t seem to mind me borrowing her old 2017 12-inch MacBook for this while I ponder my options.

I have provided feedback to Apple about this on multiple occasions and nothing has changed. So, I need to take a leaf from MacSparky’s book and accept the state of Photos on iPad for what it is and move on.

It’s sad. :unamused:

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That’s a critical bug (or it would be for a different company than Apple) it’s corrupting a key piece of data.

How are you importing photos? What’s your workflow?

I use Photos for iPad quite a bit, as it is so very practical to use across Apple devices. The basic editing capabilities are usually enough for me to touch up an iPhone photo before posting to social media.

However, I maintain a Lightroom library for all photos shot on other cameras than the iPhone.

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I have only found two ways to get photos in the right chronological order:

  1. Import normally into the Photos library on the iPad. Then go to a metadata editing app (I use Metapho) and manually edit the date/time for each photo. You need a metadata app since you need look quite deep into the metadata to find the original capture date. I have tried to develop a shortcut to this, but I don’t think I can get to the right metadata to achieve this. I’m not an expert in Shortcuts though.

  2. The other workflow is to give up on the iPad and use a Mac. No problems at all

The iPad is a great tool for editing photos. I use Pixelmator Photos, Raw Power, Affinity Photo. I’m looking forward to C1 as well. But this Photos bug is a killer.

Ugh! I would begin to image how this also means that any photos imported to Photos on the iPad cannot be used to support legal cases. Granted, you say that the true date when the photo was captured is still in the (EXIF) meta data for the photo. But … What happens when that information was not stored, for example by a camera that relied only on the creation date to the photo.


JJW