Photos shared to Immich don't have any EXIF data

[eygraber]

The bug

I used the new share to Immich feature from my Android device to upload a photo from WhatsApp to Immich. However all of the EXIF data is stripped, so I have to manually set the datetime, etc...

The OS that Immich Server is running on

Ubuntu 24.04

Version of Immich Server

v1.125.1

Version of Immich Mobile App

v1.125.1

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Your docker-compose.yml content

N/A

Your .env content

N/A

Reproduction steps

1. Share a photo from WhatsApp
2. Choose Immich
3. Observe that the EXIF data is not present on Immich

Relevant log output

Additional information

No response

[schuhbacca]

I am pretty sure what's app basically strips all the exif data from the photo. So immich has nothing to read. The only thing that remains is the creation date. If you run exif tool on the image you will probably see there's not really much in there.

[eygraber]

I wrote a POC app that I can share images to from WhatsApp, and then I write the EXIF DateTime tag to it, and then re-share it to Immich. I verified that the image uploaded to Immich has the DateTime tag that I wrote to it, but Immich still uses the upload time. So I think there is a bug here, or at least something that could be improved.

[schuhbacca]

What exif property did you write in the asset?

[eygraber]

DateTime

[schuhbacca]

That's not a valid exif tag to use for time. See:

[eygraber]

Ah thank you, that worked!

Ideally it would be nice for this functionality to be in Immich instead of a different app, and WhatsApp does use a very specific naming template for their files, but I can understand if it's not desirable to have workaround in Immich for other apps.