how to fix wrong dates on photos, so they land in the right year.

when you sort photos by date, every picture with the wrong one ends up in the wrong place. a few strays are easy to ignore. a few hundred, and the years stop making sense: birthdays out of order, a holiday split across two decades, a baby who appears before the wedding.

the good news is that most wrong dates come from a handful of causes, and each one has a simple fix. you don't need special software for most of it, just the photo app you already have and a little patience.

first, know which date you're looking at

a photo file usually carries more than one date, and they're easy to mix up.

• date taken. the camera or phone writes this inside the file at the moment the picture is taken. it's the one that matters, and it's the date most photo apps sort by.
• date created and date modified. your computer sets these for the file itself. they often change when a file is copied, downloaded or saved again, so they tend to show when the file arrived, not when the moment happened.

so if a folder sorted by date looks wrong, check which date it's sorted by before changing anything. sometimes the date taken is fine and the folder is just showing the copy date.

why photos end up with the wrong date

• the camera clock was never set. many cameras fall back to a default date when the battery runs flat or is taken out, so whole memory cards can say 2000 or 2010 when they're really from years later.
• time zones and daylight saving. a camera set to home time while you're traveling, or never moved forward an hour in spring, gives dates that are right but times that are off. that's enough to shuffle the order of a day.
• scans of printed photos. a scan carries the day it was scanned, not the day the picture was taken. a box of 1980s prints scanned last weekend all say last weekend.
• downloads and exports. some apps and services remove or change the date taken when you download a copy. the facebook download is a well-known example.
• pictures that came by message or email. photos saved from a chat or an email often carry the day you saved them.

step 1: work on a copy

before you change a single date, make sure the photos you're working on have a second copy somewhere else. date changes are usually safe and many apps let you undo them, but a backup means a mistake costs you nothing. if your collection isn't backed up yet, the 3-2-1 habit for family videos works just the same for photos.

step 2: find the photos with wrong dates

you don't need to check every picture. wrong dates tend to come in batches, so look for the batches.

• look at the very start and end of the timeline. sort everything by date taken and look at the oldest years. a pile of pictures from 1970, 1980 or 2000 that clearly aren't from then is a camera clock that was never set.
• look for impossible moments. snow in july, a child older than they should be, a phone in a photo from before phones like that existed.
• look for one day with far too many photos. hundreds of pictures on a single date often means a scanning session, a download or a copy, not one very busy day.

make a short list as you go: which batch, what it currently says, and what it should say.

step 3: work out the real date

you don't always need the exact day. the right month, or even the right year, is enough to put a picture in its proper place. some clues that help:

• one photo you're sure of. if a memory card has a birthday on it, and you know that birthday's date, you know how far off the whole card is.
• the back of the print. some photo labs printed a month and year on the back, and people often wrote names and dates there too.
• the people and places. ages, haircuts, a house you lived in, a car you had. ask family; one phone call can date a whole album.
• messages, calendars and journals. an old email, a calendar entry or a journal entry can pin down a trip or a party.

for a guess, choose the first of the month, or the middle of the year, and keep a note of which dates are guesses.

step 4: change the dates

most photo apps let you change the date taken, and many let you change a whole batch at once.

• on an iphone, open the photo in the photos app, tap the info button, then tap adjust next to the date and time. to change several, tap select, choose the photos, and do the same. the same screen has a revert option to go back to the original date.
• in photos on a mac, select the photos, then choose image > adjust date and time. enter the right date and time and click adjust. when several photos are selected, the same shift is applied to all of them, so pictures keep their order within the batch.
• in google photos, open the photo, swipe up or tap the info button, and tap the pencil next to the date. on photos.google.com on a computer you can select a group and choose edit date & time to shift them together, with a preview before you save.
• on a windows pc, right-click a photo, choose properties, open the details tab and click the date taken field. for many jpeg files you can type the right date there. if the field won't change, a dedicated metadata tool such as exiftool can do it, always on a copy.

the batch tools are the real time-saver. if a camera's clock was exactly three years and two hours behind, fixing one photo tells you the shift, and the whole card can move at once.

step 5: check the dates came with you

a date changed inside one app doesn't always travel with the file. some apps keep your change in their own library rather than in the photo itself. so after fixing a batch, make a test: export or download one corrected photo, open it somewhere else, and check that the date taken is the new one. if it isn't, look for an export option that includes the adjusted information before you move the whole collection.

step 6: name folders by when, too

dates inside files are what apps read. folder names are what people read. naming folders with the year first, like 2004-07 lake trip, keeps them in order on any computer, and it gives a second record of when things happened if a date inside a file is ever lost again. how to organize old digital photos, by when they happened goes through this in more detail.

a few things to leave alone

• don't fix one photo at a time if a batch will do. it's slower, and it can break the order of pictures within a day.
• don't chase the exact minute. the right day, month or year is what puts a memory in the right place.
• don't delete a photo because its date is a mystery. put it in a folder called undated and come back to it. someone in the family may know.

where treasure box fits

treasure box is the private life archive we're building to hold a whole life in one place, ordered by when things happened. the first version starts with photos and videos: you bring them in from your browser, it reads the date each one was taken, and lays them out on one private timeline. that's why the dates matter so much. the more of them are right, the more your timeline reads like your life.

the dates you fix today are worth fixing for any archive you use, now or later. if a private timeline sounds like the kind of home you'd want for them, see how treasure box works or read our privacy promises.

← more from the blog