Background:
Some years ago at the start of an extended trip around Australia my camera (a Nikon) gave up the ghost so I started using my iPhone5S and it took quite acceptable pictures.
I used my standard process of transferring my photos (not using the Photos app) and could extract the and manipulate the EXIF data.
Due to the Covid enforced travel restrictions I haven’t done much travelling or photography.
I the meantime I upgraded to an iPhone13 but only used it for casual snapshots.
I recently returned fro a trip to South Africa and took quite a few photos using the iPhone, which I have transferred to my Mac Mini using Finder. For some reason best known to Apple it quarantined all my photos, but I removed the extended attribute.
I noticed I had a mix of JPG & HEIC images (I am sure there is a setting to control this).
I wanted to convert the HEIC to JPG and reduce the size for uploading to a website.
I have discovered a number of methods (using Quick Action Convert Image or in Preview)
The Convert Image action has an option to Preserve Metadata but this didn’t seem to conserve the Date Time Digitised or Date Time Original
My older code could extract this data, but only worked with JPG files.
My questions are is there a method to convert retaining these attributes or some simple process to extract from the HEIC file (because I have verified that EXIF exists)
I have found that the Finder Preview does actually show the Date Time Original – which it calls “Content Created”.
What I need now is a method to extract it and use to modify the date. My existing workflow no longer seems to work
I have found exiftool -DateTimeOriginal extracts the desired Date/Time
