I have spent hours on this. No matter what I do, ZenPhoto doesn't seem to read the exif date on my photos. It always seems to detect the date that the photo was last saved instead. I have installed and uninstalled at least 10 exif editors, and I have changed every possible date I can find (taken, acquired, etc.). No matter what, when I refresh metadata, it defaults to the last time the image was saved. I'm trying to do a family photo site and I'd prefer to have the date in the pictures rather than manually entering the year of the photo for each picture (I have over 2000). Any ideas?

Note: I do have the xmpMetadata plugin activated and configured for my jpgs. Other data is pulled, though it would be nice to have a map of what populates what (IE, Zen's Title is really from Subject, not Title; I can't figure out what might populate description, etc.)

Do you have all fields enabled for import on Options > Image > Metadata?

Generally EXIF sadly is not a real standard so cameras may be off sadly.

General info about meta data processing you find here:
https://www.zenphoto.org/news/zenphoto-image-metadata-processing/

Thank you. Weirdly, that did work. I say weirdly, as I had turned off things that I knew I wouldn't need for this site as everything is scans of old photos, but had left on everything that seemed related to date or time or subject, etc, that I thought I would need. I turned everything back on and now it works. LoL, what a waste of several hours because I wanted to keep my database cleaner by not reading what I thought were unneeded fields.

I also noticed that sometimes (not always), when copying from my computer to my NAS, some tag info doesn't copy, so it's best to edit these on the NAS directly (I started editing on my computer as some tagging software could not see my NAS)

Now if I could figure out why both Title and Description seem to be pulling from the same tag.

I can't edit my note above as it's been over an hour, but if it will help others, I found that when using GeoSetter to tag my photos, that the following tags equate to the tags picked up by ZenPhoto:

Object Name = Title of the picture

Caption = Description

Keywords = Tags (though, different editing software adds to different keyword locations, some of which is picked up by ZenPhoto and some of which is not; also, some are not even seen by other editing software, so stick to one editing software - GeoSetter in my case)

Taken Date = Date

Yes, editing is blocked after a while ;-) Good you figured it out. As said it's all not a real fixed standard. But IPTC fields work quite well in the past.via for example Photoshop