Metadata like timestamp missing after editing / falsely replaced with current date

[foss-]

SimpleTools issue SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Gallery#2582

Describe the bug
After editing an image via Simple Gallery, the metadata of the photo is lost.
Editing a photo using the Simple Gallery Editor will lose all metadata, such as: Date of acquisition, Camera, GPS coordinates...
Is it possible to preserve the metadata of the original image? Or, even better, ask if you want to keep them.

Metadata of the original photo:

Metadata of the photo edited with Google Photos:

Metadata of the photo edited with Simple Gallery:

Expected behavior
Creation date should remain the same if a copy of a photo is created or an image was edited.

Device info (please complete the following information):
Original report against:
Simple Gallery Pro 6.24.1 (foss)
Android 11

And confirmed by second user for:
LineageOS 19.1 2022-11-07
Simple-Gallery 6.25.4 Pro

[keithfancher]

This issue is the only thing that keeps me going back to certain "other" gallery apps... just need to be able to quickly crop a photo without losing all the EXIF data!

[Wintandre]

I've recently noticed this myself having moved all my photos to a new device and after fixing the date taken, I saw that photos that had been edited were out of the order I'd set.

It would definitely be useful to have any fix as an option, either at the time of saving or as a preference, as there are certainly times where it is useful to remove the metadata.

In the meantime, I copied my files to my computer and fixed the date with the exiftool program (available on Linux distributions)... for example
exiftool -preserve -d "%Y%m%d %H%M%S" -AllDates="20210430 162159" IMG_20210430_162159_627.jpg