Background:
When you display a photo in the Photos App, the time it was taken and the location where it was taken (if present) are shown above the photo.
On a Mac, the time shown is the local time for the place where the photo was taken. However, on an IOS device, the Photos app uses the local time at the device’s CURRENT location. For example, I live in the Pacific Time Zone but shot some pictures in Europe a few weeks ago. A picture shot at 10:30 am in Paris, when viewed on my iPhone or iPad, claims to have been shot at 1:30 am.
Note that I discovered this using photos from my iCloud Photo Library.
I found your post here when I was trying to research this, Alan! I hadn’t noticed this, as I rarely look at dates on photos in iOS, but the is new behavior in iOS 12? Did you just notice in February, and have you seen it change? I can find other people complaining about this, too, but I’m not sure if it’s a bug (that will be fixed) or a long-running problem. Thanks!
I first noticed it IOS 12, but I can’t say for sure that it didn’t happen earlier. I just rechecked and it still occurs under IOS 12.3. It appears to affect all pictures, not only those taken on iPhones. I went back several years (2014) and found it on pictures taken in Europe on my Canon and imported into Aperture. Under Apple Photos on my iMac, the correct local time for the photo location (i,e, GMT or European Central Time) is shown, but on my iPhone and iPad the equivalent Pacific Time (local for Oakland, CA) is shown.
Through AirDrop I got a photo from somebody else’s iPhone. They took that pic back in 2018. Now it’s at the very end of my camera roll and the photos list on my iPhone. But on my Mac the photos list correctly displays it together with the other 2018 pics.
This is so obvious, I wonder if it’s meant to be a feature rather than a bug. If it were a bug, how could all those engineers and the hundreds of thousands of beta testers miss something so simple? Yikes if that’s supposed to be a feature.
Sorry, my bad. Not in photos list, but in Photo Stream. On my iPhone it shows up at the very end with a pic from yesterday, while on my Mac it correctly gets listed along with other 2018 pics.
