In this video, Neil DeGrasse Tyson describes the photon as timeless…experiencing no passage of time as it transverses distance.
Why Photons Experience No Time 
#space #timeexploration #universe #cosmicexploration #sciencr - YouTube
Now, a photon can be graphically represented as a collection of sine waves as the associated electric and magnetic fields oscillate throughout its trajectory.
photon_wave.jpg (1328×918)
But isn’t oscillation a function of distance and time?
Oscillation can be thought of as a function of distance called wavelength. It can also be thought of as a function of time called frequency. They are interconvertable. In math terms it’s wavelength (lambda) = velocity / frequency.
At least that’s true when velocity is less then c and hence time is not zero.
The (quantized) electromagnetic field operators do indeed depend on distance and time. Now, in Feynman’s analogy, a photon can (virtually) take all possible paths, also forwards and backwards in time— it is not really like a classical billiard ball in the quantum picture— but what you want to calculate is the probability that it will travel from one place to another in a given amount of time and you get the answer that it will go in a straight line and travel at the speed of light as a classical approximation, however there are indeed quantum effects; e.g., you can set up a beam splitter and have a single photon simultaneously take two quite different paths. But, no, it does not “experience time”. If light is moving slowly through a material like glass, this has to be analysed in terms of the photon interacting with the atoms of the medium.
If we describe the photon from our own frame of reference, then yes, it takes a finite time to reach its destination, and it travels a finite distance. Because those things are part of our frame of reference.
But if you try to ask what it’s like from the photon’s frame of reference, you quickly come to the conclusion (if you’re being careful and mathematically rigorous) that you just can’t use the photon as a frame of reference. At best, you can (sometimes) take a limit of some things as the frame of reference of a particle approaches the speed of light. Among the limits you can find this way are that the limit of the time elapsed is zero, and the limit of the distance traversed is zero. But some things, like phase, you can’t even take that limit, which is why you can’t use the photon itself for a reference frame.
Is this still true if the photon is traveling through (for example) glass, where its speed is less than c?
Everything’s more complicated in a non-vacuum than in a vacuum. There are a lot of different ways to describe electromagnetism in a material, and the different ways of describing it will have different answers. Worse, the different descriptions look superficially similar, so it’s not always easily clear from context what description is being used.
Personally, I favor thinking of a material as being a scattering of charges, with vacuum in between them. In this interpretation, the photons travel through the vacuum in between in the same way that they do through any vacuum, but they’re frequently absorbed and emitted. I favor this interpretation because I’m a theorist, and it’s the more conceptually-simple explanation. In practice, however, for most problems, it’s easier to average out over all of the charges and treat the material as uniform, which has subtle and conceptually-complicated effects on the mechanics of electromagnetism. So people who care more about predicting what the readouts on their lab equipment will say than about fundamental understanding will prefer that approach.
Hold up, you’ve crossed the streams. You can’t model light both as a particle and as a wave together. For any given event, pick one or the other.
Quantum electrodynamics is the proper language for this. Feynman has a popular-science book about it: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Wikipedia
(Or you can look up “quantum electrodynamics” on Wikipedia: Quantum electrodynamics - Wikipedia)