Photos App not sorting HEIC images by metadata date

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The Basics

  • Nextcloud Server version (e.g., 29.x.x):
    • 30.0.1
  • Operating system and version (e.g., Ubuntu 24.04):
    • Ubuntu 24.04
  • Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Yes / No):
    • Yes, but this is also the first time I use NextCloud…
  • When did this problem seem to first start?
    • As soon as I started using Photos, about 1 week ago…
  • Installation method (e.g. AIO, NCP, Bare Metal/Archive, etc.)
    • AIO
  • Are you using Cloudflare, mod_security, or similar? (Yes / No)
    • No

Summary of the issue you are facing:

While Photos is clearly sorting many images by the Creation date taken from the metadata of the files, it is failing to do so for HEIC images. It also fails for images that might have less complete metadata than provided by modern digital cameras, e.g. scanned images.

Steps to replicate it (hint: details matter!):

  1. Import an HEIC image
  2. Import a scanned image
  3. See images in Photos where they will be “listed” with a date equal to the time they were imported, rather than when they were created.

Log entries

I’m new so not sure which logs would be relevant…

I have the same problem, running Nextcloud on TrueNAS. I wonder whether it’s about some codecs missing?