Sharing images from Signal app (Android and iOS) does not keep their date/time

[kelson42]

I'm an Ente Photos new user. It works well for me and I'm transfering many pictures I made and shared with friends via Signal app, years ago... to Ente Photos.

I just navigate through the Signal chat older messages and if I like a picture, then I share it via the "share" OS feature (Android and iOS) with the Ente Photos app. All of this works well, but the date of the picture is somehow not transmistted, the pictures always appear in Ente Photos as been made today.

I would like the date and time of the pictures kept is Signal, to be saved and taken in account in Ente Photos as well.

Obviously might be something to fix on Signal app side, but because I don't know the Ente requirements for that, I prefered to start here with my report/question.

[laurenspriem]

As far as I know Signal automatically strips metadata when sharing images, meaning there's no timestamp for Ente to use. So I don't think this is something that can be fixed from Ente's side

[ua741]

@kelson42 We do try to infer the timestamp from the file name whenever possible. Can you confirm what's the filename you see on android?

[kelson42]

@kelson42 We do try to infer the timestamp from the file name whenever possible. Can you confirm what's the filename you see on android?

Image.JPEG seems to be the name. I see also no EXIF data.

Does Ente Photos has a kind of integration guide for devs? Something I could link to in the issue I will open in Signal app repository?

[kelson42]

@ua741 @laurenspriem Do you think the following Signal app fix is going to do the thing for Ente Photos (via Signal share feature)? signalapp/Signal-Android@237ac9f

[ua741]

@ua741 @laurenspriem Do you think the following Signal app fix is going to do the thing for Ente Photos (via Signal share feature)? signalapp/Signal-Android@237ac9f

If the photo is uploaded from on-device album to ente, this should ideally work.
But if we share the photo from outside Ente (via system share), then unless the photo name or exif contains the information about date, the creation time for those photos will fallback to the date of upload.