Phone is showing just the transfer date of recently transferred photos in apps

[Dspence]

So I have recently changed phones from Xiaomi to Samsung S21 and transferred all the photos etc, in the Samsung gallery after deleting all the old WhatsApp photos all the photos seem to have the right date and are in the correct order. 

Unfortunately when trying to post to apps such as Facebook and Instagram all my photos and videos say the 9th Sept (date I did the transfer), is there any way I can change this?

It's becoming very difficult for me, I could cope if they all had the same date but were in order but they are all jumbled up photos and videos of the past few years. I'm often posting or messaging photos to people of past makes for my small business but at the moment it's just impossible to be able to find what I'm looking for without it taking forever which is something I just can't afford to do. 

Is there anything anyone can think of that can find a solution to this problem?

Thanks

[Members_Philip]

ok thank you so much, why don't Samsung advertise  this fix, as many people I know have the same issue and not aware of this fix 

[Members_Philip]

or better still fix the issue! 

[Anmac1789]

if you took photos with the xiaomi camera app then it has a date taken exif field which records the time the photo was taken and if u transferred to the s21, it is organizing the date taken from xiaomi to organize your photos (that's my best guess) but there's something else that's reading the date modified (the date you transferred all your photos to the s21 which means all those photos have the same date modified even though they were taken at different periods in the days)

[janny_87]

The exif metadata that is created by the camera and contains various datetime attributes is permanent and survives of you copy the photo to another device.

What isn't is the file modified date, which is part of the file system and won't be transferred when you copy the photo to another device. The date of transfer becomes the file modified date then. Means if you restore photos from one device to another, all your photos share the same modified date with and the time of the transfer. The order of the transfer is kinda random, which results the images to appear not in chronological order in the gallery.

Then there's a 3rd date, that is part of the media data store database, the date_added date which gets created when the media scanner scans the file. The media store serves as cache, it also reads the file modified date and exif taken date into the database and lots of other data, like the filepath etc. That data is then used to display the Photo in the gallery Apps, since Reading the data from the database ist much quicker than reading it on from the filesystem every time.

The date_added date is used to display the images in the recents view in gallery apps, but also the camera roll in Facebook and Instagram use that.

The app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.duong.imagedatefixer

Can restore the file modified dates by using the exif capture date, that way your images will be shown in the correct order again in your gallery. 

The date_added date is immutable though, so there is a workaround needed to fix order in the recents view and in the camera rolls from Facebook or Instagram.

[Anmac1789]

hmmm that's quite interesting. So you are effectively saying android reads files and it's metadata from a database file instead of reading each file individually. What is this file called may i ask ? The reason I ask is that when I import photos to my windows PC, the thumbnails is all screwed, the dates are of another picture and the picture itself shows that of another. So, its all wonky. I'm thinking my photo database is corrupted. Is there any forensic analysis information about this ?

[janny_87]

The system has a service that scans all media on your device to a database called media store and makes it available to 3rd party applications to read from. The performance would be a nightmare if apps would need to read the data themselves from the filesystem and take care that it is always up 2 date...or even worse implement their own cacheing database.

I didn't find any non technical documents ad hoc. Just Google Android Media Store if you are interested how it works.

[Anmac1789]

when you plug in your android phone, does the thumbnail show exactly how the photo is shown in the device itself ? What about during the import pictures and video box just before u click on import? This is on windows 10? Mine is all corrupted