Hi! As a pro photog I am interested in using Synology photos. You mention in Your video that Lightroom plays together well with SP. But have you really tried it? I have and I keep running into the issue of wrong capture dates for photos exported from Lr: the date SP shows is the export date/time, not the capture date. This is how Lr works but it obviously will make for a timeline sorted by export date, not creation date. I use exiftool to correct this before importing in SP but it is very inconvenient. Have you been abl to solve this issue?
Does Lr retain the capture date on export? I use Synology Photos and the timeline displays images by capture date. The images are JPEGs exported from raw files.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your reply. Do you use or have you tried Lr? If not, which RAW converter do you use that preserves the capture date?
Here is a screen shot of an exported JPEG in Lr Classic for macOS. As you can see the Creation Date (“Aanmaak”) is today, not the date the image was taken.
It’s not very hard to run an exiftool command on a set of freshly exported photos. However Lr supports so-called “publish folders” that are a kind of smart folders with user definable criteria that will maintain a set of exported photos in a custom folder on hard drive and which can be triggered to update and export recently added photos. Having to exif every updated set negates the ease of this workflow.
I will look into 3rd party Lr plugins which may do the exif adjustments for me.
Hi Pete,
I use Capture One, but I think that is not relevant in your case. Lr is doing a good job. From your screenshot, I can see that the content creation date is still the original date of capture. That is what Synology Photos (SP) should look at. From my side, SP looks at the creation date.
I suggest you open SP, select an image to make it full screen, and look at the information. What date does it display?
Another suggestion is that you look at the Settings in SP and determine the default sort order. Is it “by date taken”?
Hi @Paul,
I apologise for taking a long time to respond. Today I spent some time to test. It turns out that I was a bit confused:
Photos exported from Lr that import into Synology Photos get sorted by the capture date, so you are right.
Video’s exported from Lr that import into Synology Photos get sorted by the export date, i.e. a video I just exported tonight (May 29th 2025) gets sorted to the top of the grid. This is obviously not what I want to happen.
So apparently Lr handles video exports date fields differently, so I will only need to fix dates for videos, not for photos.
