Inconsistent EXIF time between .HEIC and live image .MOV

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Level 1

52 points

Inconsistent EXIF time between .HEIC and live image .MOV

Upon returning home from holidays with iPhone 16 Pro (iOS 26.0.1) pictures I am importing them to my MacBook Pro (macOS 26.0.1) via AirDrop. In “Options” I set “All photos data” to import both the image (.HEIC) file and the live image (.MOV) file. (Annoying that “All photos data” has to be set each time and apparently cannot be set to stay on, but that is another issue).

The issue is that there is an hours inconsistency in the EXIF time data for the .HEIC and .MOV file.

I was away from my Home time zone of British Summer Time (GMT/UTC +1) and the Local time zone in the holiday destination was GMT/UTC +2. My iPhone time was set to the Local time when the pictures were taken.

The .HEIC files are now airdropped to my Mac with a Creation time representing the Home time zone (GMT/UTC +1) and an EXIF time representing the Local time zone (GMT/UTC +2). That is not unreasonable.

The .MOV files, however, are airdropped to my Mac with the Creation time representing the Home time zone (GMT/UTC +1), but with the EXIF time representing GMT/UTC +0 which is obviously inconsistent with the .HEIC files.

I am trying to figure out why there is this inconsistency.

iPhone 16 Pro, iOS 26

Posted on Nov 2, 2025 3:01 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

19,670 points

Nov 2, 2025 9:47 AM in response to D C Mellor

That sounds normal...

Image EXIF:DateTimeOriginal is local time with no time zone with an optional EXIF:OffsetTimeOriginal in newer and Apple's mobile device images (it seems that offset time was added as an afterthought when someone noticed it was missing from the original EXIF spec...).

QuickTime movie (.mov, .mp4, .m4v) QuickTime:CreateDate is UTC and it seems you are seeing that time. Well behaving apps should automatically convert that to whatever time zone the user's computer is set to (file creation & modification dates behave the same). Apple's mobile devices also use and prefer Keys:CreationDate which has time zone and is local time so they behave about the same as EXIF image times (Android devices use UserData:DateTimeOriginal which behaves about the same as Keys:CreationDate).

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Answer 2

Nov 2, 2025 7:22 AM in response to D C Mellor

Movie files just don't have any universally accepted system to deal with metadata, so most of us have given up messing with it.

If you use a Smart Album to get all the movies from the same time zone together, and you select them all to use "Image>Adjust Date and Time," then when you fix the time on the first one, all the rest will be adjusted by the same amount! This is so much easier than trying to fool with Exif editing. I'm doing this all the time!

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