When was this photo taken? How to find the date
Phones and cameras write the date and time into the photo file itself. We show where to find them, why they are sometimes wrong, and how to date a photo that has none.
Illustrative image · the date and time usually live in the photo file itself
A photo that has sat in a folder on the computer for years, a snapshot a cousin forwards, a print from a shoebox: often nobody remembers exactly when it was taken. For a digital photo that is usually quick to find out, because the camera wrote the date and time into it at the moment of capture.
The date is in the file
Like the place it was taken, the date sits in the photo's EXIF data, down to the second. That capture date does not change when you copy or move the file. The dates your computer shows in the file list, created and modified, say something about the file, not about the photo. A photo from 2009 that you copied to a new laptop last week was, according to that list, created last week.
On an iPhone, open the photo and swipe up; the date and time are at the top of the details. On an Android phone it works the same way, in Google Photos or in the gallery app. On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties and then the Details tab, where you find the date taken. On a Mac, open the photo in Preview, bring up the inspector with cmd+I and look at the EXIF tab. To see everything a file contains, use our free EXIF viewer; it works in your browser, without the photo being uploaded.
Why the date is sometimes wrong
A camera records the time its own clock shows. A phone sets that clock itself, also when you are in another time zone; a separate digital camera does not. If the clock was never set properly, jumped back to the factory setting after a flat battery, or the camera travelled to another country, the file holds a date or time that is a few hours or even years off. A photo full of afternoon sun with a timestamp of four in the morning usually comes from such a wrongly set clock.
A camera writes the time of its own clock into the file, even when that clock is wrong.
Sometimes the date is missing altogether. WhatsApp strips the EXIF data on sending. What is left is the file name: a name like IMG-20190714-WA0012.jpg holds the day WhatsApp saved the file, so when the photo was sent or received, not when it was taken. A scan or a screenshot gets the date of the moment you make it, not that of the photo it shows.
Dating a photo without a date
With prints and slides you depend on what you can see. Many compact cameras from the eighties and nineties could print the date in orange digits in the bottom right corner of the photo. The back of a print sometimes carries a stamp or code from the photo lab, and slide mounts often show a month and a year; we wrote about that in digitising slides. Beyond that, what is in the picture helps: the car in front of the house, hairstyles, the wallpaper, and above all the age of the children.
In Ohhi
Ohhi reads the capture date from the file when you upload it. If there is none, we check whether the file name holds a date, as with that WhatsApp photo, and otherwise we use the moment of upload. You see the date in the photo's info, and with 'Period' in the filter you find the photos from a given year. If you scan a print with the app's scan mode, you fill in under 'Original date' when it was originally taken. Do that in the edit screen, because afterwards the date can no longer be changed in Ohhi.
If nobody at home remembers when an old photo was taken, share it with the family and ask in a comment. An aunt often still knows it was the summer of the new caravan, and then the year is quickly found. Create an account; there's always a free tier.
