Syncing old iPhone photo albums to current iPad and iCloud while preserving original creation dates

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Syncing old iPhone photo albums to current iPad and iCloud while preserving original creation dates

A. I have iphone albums with tons of photos stored on an 12 year old PC. I had to move the albums from one drive to another on my PC as all those old backups before itunes took up a ton of space ( Quicktime I think). When I view those album titles on my current IPAD, the albums are now empty or photos appear as black squares. I also do not see the photos under general. They are not in view on my current ipad. I am also moving to a new PC. How to I copy all the old albums to a new pc and have them sync to my current ipad or apple account. B. I also want the original photo create date to stay the same and not update if I copy them to a new location? C. Is the a better way to store / organize photos with a different photo app. D. Besides syncing to icloud everynight, I will occasionally plug my phone into computer and make a full backup with Itunes. That file takes up so much space that I need to save it an external drive and not on my pc. Can I do that? THANK YOU

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Apple Photo albums from first Iphone not syncing to current phone/ipad and not uploading to icloud

iPad Pro, iPadOS 26

Posted on Oct 11, 2025 4:19 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 11, 2025 7:31 AM in response to Stacyz1

Windows Explorer, like Mac Finder, is a File Management System, so it sees the date the File was created or modified. Image Management Systems like Photos don't pay much attention to when a file was created-- they use the picture's metadata that includes the image creation date. So it may be that your pictures are just fine, and the image creation dates are all intact. I'm pretty rusty with Windows, so I can't be sure. Sometimes file transfers can strip some or all metadata from an image file--email and messaging often do that, for instance, though Explorer shouldn't. You may be able to see the original dates with an appropriate image viewer in Windows.

iCloud isn't a good backup since it also faithfully copies disastrous blunders. It's great that you also copy the pictures directly to your computer. Photos has way more information than what gets copied, though. For instance, do you copy both the originals and the edited versions? And face names and some other data aren't included in the metadata. But iCloud keeps all that stuff.

The iCloud.com site lacks a lot of versatility-- you can't download more than 1000 pictures at a time, for instance. And you can't tell it directly where to put the downloads. That is handled by the browser. On my Mac, in Safari's Settings, I can specify the download location, and I can set that as an external drive. I'm guessing that will be the case for your browser, as well.

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