A few years ago I noticed that the Apple Photos App had changed the dates on a whole bunch of my photos, like hundreds of them. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the change. It was a bunch of randomly selected photos from different years that had suddenly been backdated to the 1920s, as in the Roaring 20s. Well, I figured it was a typical Apple bug from their updating iPhoto to Photos, etc. I was extremely annoyed but I figured there wasn’t much to be done about it, so I didn’t complain. I just figured I’d get around to re-dating the photos one day but I never did. At least the photos themselves were unharmed, which was the main thing. The metadata can always be updated, even though it’s a pain in the whatever to do so.

Yesterday my sister asked me what happened to the Shared Album I had created a few years ago. I checked and it was still there, called Family, but there was nothing in it. Once again I figured it was a casualty of Apple’s continual updating. So I repopulated the album and then I noticed that many, not all, and once again randomly, many of the photos in the Shared Family Album now exhibit vastly different date stamps than they do in the main Library of the Photos App.

I sent a note of inquiry about it to the appropriate Apple Forum, but based on past experience I don’t expect to get a satisfactory answer. At best I might hear back that as nobody, but nobody else of their billions of other customers has reported anything similar, it must be something that I’ve done.

I do realize that software has gotten exponentially more complicated in recent years, so weird bugs are going to happen. Still, I like to keep the date stamps on my photos reasonably accurate (very difficult when scanning in photos from 60 or more years ago when one isn’t sure just who is even in the pic), just so I can sort them in a chronologically sensible order.

Just as an example, in the main Library of the Photos App the photo at the top of this post has the date stamp (which I manually applied based on my best guess as to when the photo was taken) of:

But in the Shared Album it’s:

So it looks like 62 years was added to the date just from putting it into the Shared Album. Whatever that means.

Oh yes, just out of curiosity I deleted that photo from the Shared Album and then added it back into the album. Still the same problem. At least Apple’s bug is consistent.