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I was copying over one of my photos from the Photos app using the AirDrop share option. Once the file copied over to my Mac I was very surprised to notice that the created and modified file time attributes were listed for the time the file was air dropped, not the actual content creation time like seen in the same File Attribute snippet shown below. Did AirDrop modify the file, what's going on here exactly?

File Time attributes

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  • Look at this on apple forum
    – Ptit Xav
    Commented May 15, 2022 at 23:27
  • 2
    Are you checking by right-clicking the image file and selecting Get Info? That shows the file system date/time i.e. when the file was written to its current location. To check the metadata date/time, click open the photo in Preview, then either click the 'i' icon or Tools > Show Inspector > Exif.
    – MacEater
    Commented May 17, 2022 at 3:02
  • Yah that snippet is from Finder. I think that Content created row actually derives from the exif metadata.
    – jxramos
    Commented May 17, 2022 at 4:43

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I believe there may be a few things at play that could account for this.

1. Air Drop Failure

Just now I was in the process of moving a bunch of low priority files off my device. At some point in the evening Air Drop failed a transfer. I took a screen shot of the moment and the notification as seen here Air drop from "device" failed

When I walked backwards after noticing many minutes later that the files that were transferring did not match the dates that were expected I scrolled backwards to all those files created this evening. The first file that had the mismatching timestamp was listed just before the above screenshot in finder. That's strong evidence that something got corrupted on the iOS or macOS side at that time and the Air Drop app could no longer provide the file attribute data from the iOS device and was instead going with the macOS system time unfortunately.

File attribute time not matching content created time like other photos that were air dropped

On my macbook is some mysterious CPU surging occurring from mds and it's sibling mds_stores, each taking up 72.1% and 49.90% respectively surprisingly enough.

All photos share the same Created and Modified file system attributes and yet the embedded exif content created timestamp seems to be on a different clock that's actually moving.

Activity Monitor singling out mds process Activity Monitor singling out mds_stores process Activity Monitor

2. Bug in Photos

I was reviewing another batch of air drops I just executed now starting at a date I think came after the air drop failure experience above. I found an curious inexplicable set of timestamps where the Created and Modified times stood still for a round of photos of a single subject. Take a look at the following screen snippets from Finder for these files

Image 1

Created: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:32 AM

Modified: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:32 AM

Content created: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:07 AM

1107am

Image 2

Created: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:32 AM

Modified: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:32 AM

Content created: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:08 AM

1108am

Image 3

Created: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:32 AM

Modified: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:32 AM

Content created: Friday November 25, 2022 at 11:09 AM

1109am

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