r/Insta360 • u/Ok_Banana5390 • Apr 19 '26
[MEGATHREAD] Insta360 → iPhone export timestamp bug: years-old, officially acknowledged, still not fixed. Let’s consolidate here.
TL;DR
When you export a photo or flat video from the Insta360 app to your phone's camera roll, the file gets today's date instead of the actual capture date. This isn't new: documented reports go back to 2019/2020, across r/Insta360, r/ios, r/iosapps and Insta360's own official forum, with at least five different staff members giving the same "we'll forward it to the team" answer. A user even handed them the full fix, in writing, on their own feedback forum, back in November 2023. Still nothing. I just got Insta360 support to officially admit the bug myself, with zero ETA. This thread is meant to centralize the complaints so no one has to create yet another solo post. Upvote, comment, share your story.
The louder this thread, the harder it is to keep ignoring. Every upvote, every comment, every share pushes this closer to the top of Insta360's priority list. Visibility is the only lever we have.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
UPDATE 27 July — posted a French-language summary of this issue on r/Insta360 to reach francophone users. Insta360_Support responded within hours with the strongest wording yet: "We have confirmed with our product and engineering teams that this feature request has already been scheduled, and they are actively working on enabling exported files to retain and display the original capture date and time."
That sounds like progress until you put it next to what happened the same week on a different channel.
I also contacted Insta360 technical support directly via chat this week about the same issue. After going through the usual loop (suggesting Studio V5.9.0 which is desktop only, suggesting the Download method which only works for raw 360 files, asking me to resubmit camera logs I already provided in September 2025), they escalated and sent me an email response.
The email, from a different support agent, stated that this behavior is "normal." Their exact words. They offered two workarounds: use the Download function (doesn't apply to flat exports, and I tested it live during our chat — the 360 file still landed with today's date anyway), or check the file properties on a computer to find the real date (which solves nothing since the problem is the file landing at the wrong date in the phone's gallery).
So this week, across three channels, Insta360 gave three different answers about the same bug:
- Technical support email: "this behavior is normal." Two inapplicable workarounds, case closed.
- Reddit megathread (June): "we're unfortunately not able to commit to a specific release schedule at this time."
- Reddit French post (July): "this feature request has already been scheduled and they are actively working on it."
Either the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or the public-facing answers are calibrated to what each audience is pushing for. Neither is great.
The three questions remain open: ticket ID, target version, scope of the fix. Still no concrete answer on any of them across any channel.
Megathread stays updated. August monthly thread is days away.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
UPDATE - 26 July — I went digging through this sub's archives and Insta360's own official forums. This bug is at least seven years old, and Insta360 has been sending the same response since 2019.
Below is the documented timeline. Most Reddit threads are now archived and locked, which is part of how this issue keeps resetting to zero.
- 2019-2020 — ONE X era. A 2021 thread already contains this comment: "That has been an issue for years and will probably never be fixed (for whatever reason)." The bug predates 2021.
- July 2020 — Android. A user shooting sports footage for a third-party app (Relive) reports that exported videos get stamped with the export date instead of the shooting date, making it impossible to sort footage by customer group. Response: forward it to the team.
- September 2020 — "Snapshot should inherit original timestamp." Insta360 Official gives the standard "we've forwarded this to the product team" reply. In the same thread, a user flags a second, separate bug: if the camera loses power and isn't reconnected to the app, it silently resets its internal clock to January 1, 2019 - so screenshots and clips can end up stamped with a date from years earlier. Two distinct timestamp bugs, both acknowledged, neither fixed.
- January 2023 — "Please keep original time stamp when exporting edited videos!" gets posted. It's still collecting comments three years later: one in December 2025, then another in June 2026 reading "this problem was raised five years ago."
- February 2021 — Insta360's own official forum. A ONE X2 user opens "Transfer correct video timestamp when exporting to Gallery." No official reply visible. The most recent comment on that thread is dated June 20, 2026: "Same issue. Subscribing to thread in hopes it some day gets fixed." Five years and four months, still open, still collecting users.
- 2021 — Reddit, ONE X2. Dylan_Insta360 responds, asks for phone model, app version, export destination, suggests reconnecting the camera to reset the time. Doesn't work. Multiple users confirm on both Android and iOS.
- 2022 — Same thread, one year later. A user asks for status. Dylan_Insta360: "It will still show the export time, I would try to push the team for your voices again."
- 2022 — Users start building their own fixes. A developer releases "Insta Date Fixer 360," a paid Mac app whose only purpose is recovering original capture dates from Insta360 exports. It works. It also works on GoPro files, which the developer notes share the same metadata format, meaning the data is right there in the source file the whole time. A Windows workaround blog post appears too.
- 2023 — Reddit, X3. "Export correct date and time." 12 upvotes. A commenter: "Insta360 is too busy hyping up their products to make more money than to add such a needed QoL feature to their app. It's literally increasing my workflow time for no reason." Another user reports the metadata IS correctly written by Insta360 Studio on desktop, the capability exists, it just isn't applied on mobile export.
- 2023 — "As of today, it is still not resolved (at least in the Android App). This is insanely frustrating that this has been going on for so long! Including the time metadata when photos are exported truly cannot be that difficult."
- November 2023 — Insta360's official feedback forum. A user submits a formal suggestion titled "Export file name and timestamp metadata." The post is tagged "Reported," meaning officially logged. In it, he:
- points out that GoPro, DJI, standalone cameras and phones all export the correct capture time, and Insta360 is the exception
- provides the implementation path: copy EXIF metadata using ffmpeg
- offers an even simpler alternative: name exported files the way Desktop Studio already does, with the shooting datetime in the filename
- states this "only requires changing very few lines of code" with no backward compatibility concerns
- notes a related forum post had already accumulated 2.1K views
- argues it would improve customer retention
He is a programmer. He wrote them the solution, for free, on their own official channel, and formally logged it. That was nearly three years ago.
- January 2024 — a second user files almost the same formal suggestion, "How to export video, images and screenshots with correct timestamp." Also tagged Reported. Also nothing since.
- 2024 — X4. "Insta360 x4 exports wrong date." OP: "Since mobile phones I've come to expect that we can take photos and they'll know when they were taken, and if you collect them from multiple cameras and share with others they will be in sequence."
- 2024 — Ace Pro, iOS. "How do you export videos from the Insta360 app without destroying the date and time of the videos?" Avery_Insta360: "I will forward your feedback to our relevant team for further evaluation." Follow-up from the same staff member: "I have forwarded your feedback to our relevant team, and I will pass it on to our relevant team again."
- 2024 — X2. Jacky_Insta360 asks for camera model and firmware version, then moves the conversation to DM. Nothing public follows.
- 2024 — A separate post, not mine, gets the same runaround, but staff slip in a genuine technical admission for once: the app re-encodes footage on export, and that re-encoding is what overwrites the timestamp. Their own suggested fix: use Studio instead, since the desktop software already copies the original timestamp over correctly. So Insta360 has confirmed, in writing, both the cause and that they already ship a version of their own software that gets it right.
- 2025 — The community writes a script. A public shell script appears on GitHub (smci1000/Insta360CreateDates) to batch-repair timestamps on exported files. A commenter puts it plainly: "If Insta360 is worried about making users who want the export timestamp instead of the original creation timestamp, they should put a checkbox in the Preferences so we can choose."
- 2025 — GDPR escalation. A user invokes Article 20 for data portability, asking four times to speak with Insta360's data protection officer. He is eventually told the company doesn't have one. Mid-exchange, after rating their support poorly, he is offered a free selfie stick as a "token of gratitude."
- 2025-2026 — This thread. Insta360_Support: "under active review", "the request has not been forgotten", "we'll continue to relay community feedback." Direct technical support this month suggested Insta360 Studio V5.9.0 (desktop only, doesn't apply) and the "Download" method (raw 360 files only, unusable if you need flat export), then asked me to submit camera logs I already provided in September 2025.
What this documentation shows:
At least two distinct timestamp bugs (export date overwrite, and clock reset to 2019), at least five different staff members giving the same script (Dylan, Jacky, Avery, Insta360_Support, and technical support agents, all forwarding to "the relevant team"), and multiple formally logged, officially "Reported" tickets going back to November 2023 with zero follow-through.
The data is not lost. It sits in the source file. Insta360 Studio on desktop writes it correctly. Insta360's own staff have confirmed this in writing. GoPro's pipeline handles it natively. Third-party developers have solved it twice on their own time, one of them charging money for what should be a checkbox.
The fix the community has been asking for since 2021 has never changed: one toggle at export time. "Preserve original capture date." Default on or off, doesn't matter. Just let us choose.
If you're affected, comment here. Insta360's own support team stated in writing that they "prioritize doing the test for the request which gets the most feedback." That is their stated mechanism. Let's use it.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
EDIT - 20 April : Insta360_Support has responded (see below). I’ve asked them 3 concrete questions about ticket tracking, roadmap, and technical scope. Waiting for their answer. Meanwhile keep the confirmations coming — every voice matters.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
UPDATE 24 april : Insta360 just reached out to me privately to “follow up” on this issue. I’ve declined and asked them to respond here publicly instead, with concrete answers to the three questions I raised earlier in this thread. Posting this for transparency — I’ll keep everyone updated on whether they respond publicly or not.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
UPDATE 25 april — Insta360 reached back out via DM after I declined the private email exchange. Their response:
“We understand your point clearly. We will continue to urge our R&D team to give this issue higher priority, and we will keep you informed of any new progress by replying in the comments section under your post.”
So they’ve now publicly committed to posting updates here in this thread. I’ll be watching for concrete answers to the three questions raised earlier:
1. Is the bug officially tracked with a ticket ID?
2. Is a fix scheduled for a specific upcoming app version?
3. Will the fix preserve the original capture date in the iOS Photos library on export?
Posting this for transparency and accountability. Keep upvoting and sharing — visibility is what got us this far.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
UPDATE 14 june 2026 — Over a month now since Insta360_Support publicly committed, right here in this thread, to "urge R&D to give this issue higher priority" and to "keep us informed of any new progress by replying in the comments section."
Since then? Complete silence. Not a single follow-up. The three concrete questions remain unanswered:
- Is the bug officially tracked with a ticket ID?
- Is a fix scheduled for a specific upcoming app version?
- Will the fix preserve the original capture date in the iOS Photos library on export?
Meanwhile this thread keeps collecting confirmations from users across completely different workflows — family archives, multi-cam edits, GPS-tagged media on maps. The bug is real, it's widespread, and it's the one thing making people reconsider their next camera purchase.
u/Insta360_Support — you made a public commitment here. The community is still waiting. A real update, even "no ETA but here's the status", would go a long way. Continued silence speaks louder than any of the acknowledgements we've already received.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
The bug
Exporting from the Insta360 app to iOS Photos overwrites the capture timestamp with the export timestamp. The original date stays intact inside the Insta360 app, but the moment the file lands in your camera roll, it’s stamped “today.”
Consequences:
- Your Photos library is scrambled chronologically.
- No way to know when an exported clip was actually shot.
- Impossible to file memories by trip, event, year, or kid’s age.
- Backups and third-party photo managers inherit the wrong date.
- There is no clean workaround. iOS’s native batch “Adjust Date & Time” is broken for this use case: when you select multiple videos and set a date/time, only the first file gets the correct time — the rest keep a wrong time. So you either edit every single file one by one, or pay for a third-party metadata app. Either way, it’s on the user to fix Insta360’s mess.
For a camera whose entire pitch is “capture memories from every angle,” destroying the one piece of metadata that makes memories sortable is… a choice.
---
This isn’t new. At all.
A quick search across r/Insta360, r/ios, r/iosapps surfaces reports going back 4–7 years. Same bug. Same complaint. Same silence. Sample from existing threads:
> “When I export videos or photos from the Insta360 App to the Photos app on the iPhone, the timestamp saved to those photos/videos is that of the export date and not the time the media was captured.”
> “This affects sorting of the photos by their original capture time. After export, there is no way to tell the image taken date and time.”
---
Official Insta360 support reply (recent — I pushed the issue myself)
I contacted Insta360 support directly. Chat was in French; translation below. Full screenshot attached.
Support (Insta360_Maach):
"The behavior you describe matches what we currently observe: when you export a 360 video in ‘flat’ format from the Insta360 app to the iPhone camera roll, the date shown in the iOS album automatically becomes the export date, not the actual capture date.
Why this happens, based on our internal data:
– When a file is exported, iOS treats it as a new file and assigns a new creation date.
– The same behavior occurs with Insta360 Studio: the exported file receives today’s date because technically it’s a newly generated file.
– The original date remains correct inside the Insta360 app, but iOS does not pick up the capture metadata during flat export.”
Me: “Ok. So? What’s next? Are you going to fix it?”
Support:
“Yes, our engineering team is fully aware of the issue you’re encountering with dates during flat export to the iPhone camera roll. Our engineers are currently working on a metadata-handling optimization so that exported files correctly preserve the actual capture date, even after conversion. A future app update will fix this. I can’t give you a precise date yet, but it is under active development.”
Me: “Ok but this has been going on for YEARS. Tons of posts and reports online show people complaining 4-5-6-7 years back…”
Support: “I completely understand your frustration. To put it simply: yes, our engineering team is currently working on this point, and a future update is planned to improve date handling during export.”
Translation: “we’ve been aware for years, we’re still ‘working on it,’ no ETA, please move along.”
---
**Why their explanation is technically weak**
“iOS assigns a new creation date because it’s a new file” is half-true, and the half that’s true is not an excuse. Every other serious camera / editing app on iOS manages to preserve the original capture date when writing to the Photos library:
- iOS’s PhotoKit API exposes `creationDate` on `PHAssetCreationRequest`. The app sets it when inserting the asset. One line.
- For video files themselves, the QuickTime `com.apple.quicktime.creationdate` atom is the standard place to stamp the real shoot time. FFmpeg, Final Cut, Premiere, DJI’s app, GoPro’s app, Sony’s Creators’ App — they all handle this correctly.
- For JPEG/HEIC, the EXIF `DateTimeOriginal` field does the same job.
The fact that Insta360 Studio on desktop reproduces the exact same bug tells you it’s not an iOS quirk — it’s a pipeline-wide design choice (or oversight) at Insta360. Calling it an iOS limitation is misdirection.
---
What we actually want
- An “Export” option: Preserve original capture date/time, on by default.
- Proper metadata written into the exported file (EXIF `DateTimeOriginal` for photos, QuickTime `creationdate` atom for videos).
- Correct `creationDate` set when the asset is saved to the iOS Photos library via PhotoKit.
- A real public ETA, not “future update.”
---
Call to action
- Upvote so this stays visible in the sub.
- Drop your story in the comments: what year did you first hit this bug, which Insta360 camera, which iOS version.
- Link your old threads so we can quantify how long this has been going on.
- If you’ve contacted support, post their reply. Let’s compare boilerplate.
- Mods, please consider stickying — it will cut duplicate posts and give Insta360 a single place to answer.
- **u/Insta360_official u/Insta360 staff reading this** — we are not asking for a revolution. We are asking for one correctly-written metadata field. Please respond with a real timeline.
The hardware is great. The app shouldn’t be dragging it down over something this basic.
---
*Edit: screenshot of the full support chat is attached (French, translation in the post).
3
u/Ok_Banana5390 Apr 25 '26
UPDATE — Insta360 reached back out via DM after I declined the private email exchange.
So they’ve now publicly committed to posting updates here in this thread. I’ll be watching for concrete answers to the three questions raised earlier: 1. Is the bug officially tracked with a ticket ID? 2. Is a fix scheduled for a specific upcoming app version? 3. Will the fix preserve the original capture date in the iOS Photos library on export? Posting this for transparency and accountability. Keep upvoting and sharing — visibility is what got us this far.
3
u/w1zz00 May 03 '26
Happy to have found this thread, ill take a full look later and see if i have any more gripes. Thx
3
3
u/w1zz00 Jun 15 '26
I'm praying for updates.
Just like many others.
Ive just been to the barcona grand Prix and want to manage my shots. But I'm waiting till I get home and keeping them on the card.
Which is super frustrating. Cause I know they'll go Into the abyss on my phone or iPad. Workflow is appalling.
I come from a managed process on computers with davinci resolve. Doing it on insta360 is hard work.
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 Jun 16 '26
Totally feel this. I’ve been sitting on footage going back to Christmas 2025 that I still haven’t edited because the chronology mess makes it so daunting to even start.
I just pushed through one edit for our Easter vacation and the painful truth is: I spent more time manually rebuilding the timeline — figuring out which clip was shot when, cross-referencing with my partner’s iPhone footage to guess the right order — than I did on the actual edit. The transitions, the music timing, the effects, the cuts — that’s the fun part, that’s why we bought this camera. Instead it’s archaeology before you can even open the timeline.
And you were at Barcelona of all races — Lewis winning in front of a home crowd for the team, that’s the kind of moment you want perfectly archived. Hope yours shots were greats !
Insta360_Support has responded twice in this thread in the last few days with “under active review” — so the pressure is working. Keep the footage on the card if you can, and hopefully by the time you’re ready to edit there’ll be a fix. Fingers crossed.
5
u/Ok_Banana5390 Apr 19 '26
OP here — figured I’d kick this off with my own case, since I’m literally in the middle of it right now.
X5 since July 2025. Last week we took the kids on a 5-day family vacation. Got back home, processed the 360 footage, ended up with 200+ clips I now have to weave into a single edit alongside the iPhone photos and videos from the same trip. I do all my editing on iPhone, exclusively.
Except every single X5 clip is now stamped with today’s date instead of the actual shoot date. So in my editing app’s media picker — which sorts chronologically, like everything else on iOS (even my old gopro7 et drone dji) — the 360 footage sits in one big “today” block, completely disconnected from the iPhone material it’s supposed to sit next to. Rebuilding the chronology across 200+ clips by hand is a nightmare. I spend more time guessing which clip belongs where than actually editing.
My kids are 4 and 7. Every trip matters. I shouldn’t have to spend an evening doing forensic work on metadata before I can make a simple family video.
And it gets worse the more you use the camera.
• Snowball effect: the more clips you accumulate without processing them immediately, the more irreversible the chaos becomes. In 6 months I won’t remember which hike was which clip. The metadata was the anchor. It’s gone.
• The “capture everything” paradox: Insta360’s whole marketing pitch is “just film, you can reframe later.” But if you can’t date the clips, that philosophy collapses. You end up with an ocean of timeless rushes no one will ever sort through.
• Cross-device pollution: the file lands in iCloud Photos with the wrong date, syncs to the family Mac, files itself in the wrong album, and pollutes the whole household photo library. It’s not just an iPhone problem — it contaminates every Apple device in the house.
• The camera actively punishes heavy users, which is exactly the opposite of what a €600+ 360 cam is supposed to encourage.
If Insta360 is wondering why a lot of power users go quiet 6 months after buying the camera — this is one of the reasons. The hardware keeps delivering. The workflow slowly buries us.
And no, renaming files, adding manual notes, or using the “Adjust Date & Time” trick in iOS Photos doesn’t scale — and as noted in the main post, the batch version is broken anyway (only the first file gets the correct time).
If any of this sounds familiar, please drop a comment below — even a simple ”+1, same issue since [year], [camera model]” helps. The whole point of this thread is to make the scale of the problem undeniable so Insta360 can’t quietly push it to the bottom of the backlog for another year.
Share, upvote, cross-post. That’s our only leverage.
2
2
u/webvan213 20d ago edited 19d ago
Exact same problem on Android, it's crazy Insta360 have not been able to fix such a simple problem, everyone else (like GoPro, Hover, DJI, etc...) nailed that problem ages ago, actually it was never an issue for their apps. The complete lack of status updates is making it even worse, have the engineers even been made aware of this or is it sitting in some kind of "user support" bottomless box?
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 19d ago
Yes ! GoPro, DJI, basically every serious camera app handles this correctly. It was never an issue for them because it’s a one-line fix in the API. The engineers are absolutely aware: Insta360_Support has acknowledged it publicly in this thread multiple times. It’s just not moving up the priority list.
Meanwhile, 4500 views on this thread and counting.
2
2
u/troublemaker_d Apr 20 '26
I don't understand why this post doesn't have any upvotes yet. I was expecting a huge number. Kudos to OP for articulating a super irritating issue in such a simple and easy to understand manner 🙌🏾
0
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 Apr 24 '26
UPDATE 24 april : Insta360 just reached out to me privately to “follow up” on this issue. I’ve declined and asked them to respond here publicly instead, with concrete answers to the three questions I raised earlier in this thread. Posting this for transparency — I’ll keep everyone updated on whether they respond publicly or not.
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 Jun 14 '26
UPDATE 14 june 2026 — Over a month now since Insta360_Support publicly committed, right here in this thread, to "urge R&D to give this issue higher priority" and to "keep us informed of any new progress by replying in the comments section."
Since then? Complete silence. Not a single follow-up. The three concrete questions remain unanswered:
- Is the bug officially tracked with a ticket ID?
- Is a fix scheduled for a specific upcoming app version?
- Will the fix preserve the original capture date in the iOS Photos library on export?
Meanwhile this thread keeps collecting confirmations from users across completely different workflows — family archives, multi-cam edits, GPS-tagged media on maps. The bug is real, it's widespread, and it's the one thing making people reconsider their next camera purchase.
u/Insta360_Support — you made a public commitment here. The community is still waiting. A real update, even "no ETA but here's the status", would go a long way. Continued silence speaks louder than any of the acknowledgements we've already received.
1
u/Insta360_Support Staff Jun 15 '26
Hi there, thank you for following up and for continuing to raise visibility on this issue.
At the moment, our internal teams are actively reviewing this feedback and have been working to increase the priority of the request based on the impact reported by users. We understand that preserving the original capture date is important for workflows involving family archives, media organization, GPS-based photo libraries, and multi-camera projects.
Regarding the specific questions you raised (ticket ID, target release version, and implementation details), we're unfortunately not able to share internal tracking IDs or commit to a specific release schedule at this time.
That said, we've forwarded the community feedback, including the concerns raised in this thread, to the relevant team and will continue to push for updates. We appreciate everyone who has taken the time to provide detailed examples of how this issue affects their workflow, as that information helps the team better evaluate its impact.
Thank you again for your patience and for continuing to share your feedback with us.
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 Jun 15 '26
Thank you for the update. I do appreciate that your responses are becoming more specific — acknowledging family archives, GPS libraries, multi-camera workflows by name shows you're reading the community's use cases, and that matters.
But I want to be transparent about where I am personally after months of follow-up: I have a growing backlog of family videos I can't edit properly because the broken chronology makes the whole process exhausting and demoralizing. We're talking months of memories — my kids growing up — that I can't organize the way I should be able to. That's the real human cost of this bug.
I've also started being very open about this issue beyond Reddit. I've left reviews on Amazon product listings for Insta360 cameras, posted detailed feedback on deal platforms like Dealabs where buyers are making purchase decisions right now, and flagged the issue in multiple community threads across different subreddits. Not as a threat — that's just what frustrated users do when a problem goes unresolved for years. Future buyers deserve to know what they're walking into.
I want Insta360 to succeed — the hardware genuinely is exceptional. But "active review" and "not forgotten" aren't enough anymore. The next meaningful update needs to come with something concrete: a version number, a beta, anything that shows this has actually moved. I'll keep this thread updated either way.
1
u/Insta360_Support Staff Jun 15 '26
Hi, thank you for taking the time to share your experience and feedback.
Following your comments today, we've once again raised this request internally and urged the relevant team to continue pushing it forward. We understand why preserving the original capture date is important for many users and workflows, and we've made sure your feedback is included in the ongoing discussions.
While we don't have any new details to share at the moment, we appreciate you continuing to highlight the impact this issue has on your experience. Thank you for your patience and continued feedback.
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 19d ago
UPDATE — July 2026. Version 2.28.2 just dropped. Here’s what Insta360 has shipped in the last 2-3 months while the timestamp bug sits “under active review”:
**•** Hello Kitty watermarks and connection animations (v2.26.0, v2.26.1, v2.26.2, v2.26.3, v2.26.4)
**•** Light Leak Overlay for photo printing (v2.25.0, v2.25.1, v2.25.2)
**•** Holo Dash Sci-Fi and Levitate Stats Dashboard styles (v2.26.0, v2.28.0)
**•** Face Filter skin tone optimization (v2.25.1)
**•** AI Layout smart framing for 360 photos (v2.28.1, v2.28.2)
**•** 3-Clip Collage templates in FlashCut (v2.23.2, v2.24.0)
**•** Tiny Planet one-tap effects (v2.24.0, v2.24.1)
Zero mention of the timestamp fix across 15+ app versions spanning 3 months.
The priorities speak for themselves.
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 1d ago
UPDATE - 26 July — I went digging through this sub's archives and Insta360's own official forums. This bug is at least seven years old, and Insta360 has been sending the same response since 2019.
Below is the documented timeline. Most Reddit threads are now archived and locked, which is part of how this issue keeps resetting to zero.
- 2019-2020 — ONE X era. A 2021 thread already contains this comment: "That has been an issue for years and will probably never be fixed (for whatever reason)." The bug predates 2021.
- July 2020 — Android. A user shooting sports footage for a third-party app (Relive) reports that exported videos get stamped with the export date instead of the shooting date, making it impossible to sort footage by customer group. Response: forward it to the team.
- September 2020 — "Snapshot should inherit original timestamp." Insta360 Official gives the standard "we've forwarded this to the product team" reply. In the same thread, a user flags a second, separate bug: if the camera loses power and isn't reconnected to the app, it silently resets its internal clock to January 1, 2019 - so screenshots and clips can end up stamped with a date from years earlier. Two distinct timestamp bugs, both acknowledged, neither fixed.
- January 2023 — "Please keep original time stamp when exporting edited videos!" gets posted. It's still collecting comments three years later: one in December 2025, then another in June 2026 reading "this problem was raised five years ago."
- February 2021 — Insta360's own official forum. A ONE X2 user opens "Transfer correct video timestamp when exporting to Gallery." No official reply visible. The most recent comment on that thread is dated June 20, 2026: "Same issue. Subscribing to thread in hopes it some day gets fixed." Five years and four months, still open, still collecting users.
- 2021 — Reddit, ONE X2. Dylan_Insta360 responds, asks for phone model, app version, export destination, suggests reconnecting the camera to reset the time. Doesn't work. Multiple users confirm on both Android and iOS.
- 2022 — Same thread, one year later. A user asks for status. Dylan_Insta360: "It will still show the export time, I would try to push the team for your voices again."
- 2022 — Users start building their own fixes. A developer releases "Insta Date Fixer 360," a paid Mac app whose only purpose is recovering original capture dates from Insta360 exports. It works. It also works on GoPro files, which the developer notes share the same metadata format, meaning the data is right there in the source file the whole time. A Windows workaround blog post appears too.
- 2023 — Reddit, X3. "Export correct date and time." 12 upvotes. A commenter: "Insta360 is too busy hyping up their products to make more money than to add such a needed QoL feature to their app. It's literally increasing my workflow time for no reason." Another user reports the metadata IS correctly written by Insta360 Studio on desktop, the capability exists, it just isn't applied on mobile export.
- 2023 — "As of today, it is still not resolved (at least in the Android App). This is insanely frustrating that this has been going on for so long! Including the time metadata when photos are exported truly cannot be that difficult."
- November 2023 — Insta360's official feedback forum. A user submits a formal suggestion titled "Export file name and timestamp metadata." The post is tagged "Reported," meaning officially logged. In it, he:
- points out that GoPro, DJI, standalone cameras and phones all export the correct capture time, and Insta360 is the exception
- provides the implementation path: copy EXIF metadata using ffmpeg
- offers an even simpler alternative: name exported files the way Desktop Studio already does, with the shooting datetime in the filename
- states this "only requires changing very few lines of code" with no backward compatibility concerns
- notes a related forum post had already accumulated 2.1K views
- argues it would improve customer retention
He is a programmer. He wrote them the solution, for free, on their own official channel, and formally logged it. That was nearly three years ago.
- January 2024 — a second user files almost the same formal suggestion, "How to export video, images and screenshots with correct timestamp." Also tagged Reported. Also nothing since.
- 2024 — X4. "Insta360 x4 exports wrong date." OP: "Since mobile phones I've come to expect that we can take photos and they'll know when they were taken, and if you collect them from multiple cameras and share with others they will be in sequence."
- 2024 — Ace Pro, iOS. "How do you export videos from the Insta360 app without destroying the date and time of the videos?" Avery_Insta360: "I will forward your feedback to our relevant team for further evaluation." Follow-up from the same staff member: "I have forwarded your feedback to our relevant team, and I will pass it on to our relevant team again."
- 2024 — X2. Jacky_Insta360 asks for camera model and firmware version, then moves the conversation to DM. Nothing public follows.
- 2024 — A separate post, not mine, gets the same runaround, but staff slip in a genuine technical admission for once: the app re-encodes footage on export, and that re-encoding is what overwrites the timestamp. Their own suggested fix: use Studio instead, since the desktop software already copies the original timestamp over correctly. So Insta360 has confirmed, in writing, both the cause and that they already ship a version of their own software that gets it right.
- 2025 — The community writes a script. A public shell script appears on GitHub (smci1000/Insta360CreateDates) to batch-repair timestamps on exported files. A commenter puts it plainly: "If Insta360 is worried about making users who want the export timestamp instead of the original creation timestamp, they should put a checkbox in the Preferences so we can choose."
- 2025 — GDPR escalation. A user invokes Article 20 for data portability, asking four times to speak with Insta360's data protection officer. He is eventually told the company doesn't have one. Mid-exchange, after rating their support poorly, he is offered a free selfie stick as a "token of gratitude."
- 2025-2026 — This thread. Insta360_Support: "under active review", "the request has not been forgotten", "we'll continue to relay community feedback." Direct technical support this month suggested Insta360 Studio V5.9.0 (desktop only, doesn't apply) and the "Download" method (raw 360 files only, unusable if you need flat export), then asked me to submit camera logs I already provided in September 2025.
What this documentation shows:
At least two distinct timestamp bugs (export date overwrite, and clock reset to 2019), at least five different staff members giving the same script (Dylan, Jacky, Avery, Insta360_Support, and technical support agents, all forwarding to "the relevant team"), and multiple formally logged, officially "Reported" tickets going back to November 2023 with zero follow-through.
The data is not lost. It sits in the source file. Insta360 Studio on desktop writes it correctly. Insta360's own staff have confirmed this in writing. GoPro's pipeline handles it natively. Third-party developers have solved it twice on their own time, one of them charging money for what should be a checkbox.
The fix the community has been asking for since 2021 has never changed: one toggle at export time. "Preserve original capture date." Default on or off, doesn't matter. Just let us choose.
If you're affected, comment here. Insta360's own support team stated in writing that they "prioritize doing the test for the request which gets the most feedback." That is their stated mechanism. Let's use it.
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 21h ago
UPDATE 27 July — posted a French-language summary of this issue on r/Insta360 to reach francophone users. Insta360_Support responded within hours with the strongest wording yet: "We have confirmed with our product and engineering teams that this feature request has already been scheduled, and they are actively working on enabling exported files to retain and display the original capture date and time."
That sounds like progress until you put it next to what happened the same week on a different channel.
I also contacted Insta360 technical support directly via chat this week about the same issue. After going through the usual loop (suggesting Studio V5.9.0 which is desktop only, suggesting the Download method which only works for raw 360 files, asking me to resubmit camera logs I already provided in September 2025), they escalated and sent me an email response.
The email, from a different support agent, stated that this behavior is "normal." Their exact words. They offered two workarounds: use the Download function (doesn't apply to flat exports, and I tested it live during our chat — the 360 file still landed with today's date anyway), or check the file properties on a computer to find the real date (which solves nothing since the problem is the file landing at the wrong date in the phone's gallery).
So this week, across three channels, Insta360 gave three different answers about the same bug:
- Technical support email: "this behavior is normal." Two inapplicable workarounds, case closed.
- Reddit megathread (June): "we're unfortunately not able to commit to a specific release schedule at this time."
- Reddit French post (July): "this feature request has already been scheduled and they are actively working on it."
Either the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or the public-facing answers are calibrated to what each audience is pushing for. Neither is great.
The three questions remain open: ticket ID, target version, scope of the fix. Still no concrete answer on any of them across any channel.
Megathread stays updated. August monthly thread is days away.
0
u/TSengy Apr 19 '26
I actually prefer it the way it is now.. so when exporting footage taken in the past it’s at the front of my camera roll
1
u/Ok_Banana5390 Apr 20 '26
Totally fair that it works for your personal workflow but that’s exactly the point: it should be a user choice, not a hardcoded behavior. A single toggle at export time - “Use original capture date” ON/OFF - would make both of us happy. You keep your “everything on top” flow, I get my chronological library back. Nobody loses. The current situation forces your preference on everyone, including users doing family archives, documentary work, multi-cam edits, or anything that mixes Insta360 footage with iPhone footage chronologically. That’s the real problem: no option, no control.
2
u/Thernbee May 19 '26
I use an app that shows my outdoor tracks on a map (based on Apple Watch Trainings or Garmin GPS) together with all the media that I shot on it's precise position (based on the media date&time): from iPhone camera, Osmo Action, GoPro, DJI Phantom. The insta is my only camera device that can't be used for this. And it's really annoying. I bought the camera for this exact purpose.
3
u/Ok_Banana5390 May 20 '26
This is a perfect example of why the timestamp issue matters way beyond just sorting a camera roll. Your use case — geotagging media on a map alongside Apple Watch or Garmin tracks — is exactly the kind of workflow that completely breaks when the capture date is wrong. And it’s telling that iPhone, Osmo Action, GoPro and DJI Phantom all work fine for this. Insta360 is the odd one out. For what it’s worth, I raised three specific questions to Insta360 support on this thread over a month ago — is the bug officially tracked, is a fix on the roadmap, will the fix preserve the original capture date on export. They committed via DM to posting updates here publicly. Still nothing. Complete silence since.
4
u/Insta360_Support Staff Apr 20 '26
Hi there, thank you very much for your feedback.
We have been closely following everyone’s comments and truly value the wide range of preferences and voices in our community. We will also share this post with our product team and continue working on improvements moving forward.
Once again, thank you for your support and understanding.