How to date old photos that have no date

By Tiago Trindade, maker of FolioSort · Updated 29 October 2026 · 8 min read

The three dates a photo can have

Date	Where it lives	Who reads it
Date taken (EXIF DateTimeOriginal)	Inside the file	Every photo app, every cloud, every organizer — this is the one that matters
Date created	The disk, not the file	Finder and Explorer; changes every time the file is copied
Date modified	The disk, not the file	Finder and Explorer; changes every time the file is saved

When the date taken is missing, apps fall back to the created or modified date — the day you scanned, downloaded or copied the photo. That is why a 1987 birthday ends up beside last week's screenshots. Changing the file's created date fixes how it looks in one folder window; it does nothing for Google Photos, Apple Photos or a sort by date taken. Fix the date inside the file.

Which photos have no date, and why

• Scans. The scanner makes a new file. It knows when it scanned, not when the photo was taken.
• WhatsApp, Messenger and many downloads. The app strips the photo's metadata before sending it. The day usually survives only in the file name.
• Screenshots and edited exports. Some editors write a new date, some write none.
• Google Takeout. The real date sits in a .json file beside each photo; if that file went missing, so did the date. The Takeout import puts the dates back from the .json files that are there.

Where the real date hides

Before you type a single date, look at what your files already know. In order of how much to trust it:

1. The file name. Phones and messaging apps write the date into the name: 20190814_123456.jpg gives the exact time, IMG-20190814-WA0001.jpg the day.
2. The folder name. Years ago you, or someone, called a folder 2003-07 Algarve or Summer 98. That dates everything inside it — to the month, or the year.
3. The photos around it. An undated photo in a folder of photos all taken on one weekend was almost certainly taken that weekend too. It is an estimate, and should be treated as one.
4. What is on the print. For scans — see below.

This is the order FolioSort's Dates uses when it fills missing dates. Dates read from a file name are applied as found; dates that are only good to the month or the year, or estimated from neighbouring photos, are marked as approximate and stay unticked until you tick them. A photo that already has a date is never overwritten when filling.

Dating a print you scanned

Prints carry more clues than people expect:

• A date stamp in the corner, burned in by the camera.
• The back of the print: handwriting, or a lab's printed code, which often includes the processing month and year.
• The album or envelope it came from — "Christmas 1987", "Lisbon, spring 92".
• The people: a child's age is often accurate to the year.
• The world in the picture: cars, clothes, the house before the extension.

Record what you know, at the precision you know it. "Some time in 1994" is a real date for sorting purposes; a made-up exact day is worse than an honest year, because nobody can tell it apart from a true one later.

Dating hundreds of files at once

One photo you can fix by hand: on Windows, Properties › Details › Date taken for a JPEG; in Apple Photos, Image › Adjust Date and Time, which changes it only inside the Photos library. For a decade of scans and WhatsApp folders you need a batch, and three things from the tool doing it:

1. It shows every new date before writing it, beside the photo, so you can untick the ones that look wrong.
2. It writes what you actually know: an exact time, a day, a month or only a year. FolioSort writes a year-only date as 1 July at noon in EXIF — which needs a full date — and records only the year in XMP; a month-only date becomes the 15th at noon.
3. It can be undone. Every Dates run in FolioSort is one Undo, and Activity keeps your last 20 metadata writes.

RAW files get an .xmp sidecar instead of being modified, and videos get their QuickTime dates. Once the dates are written, organize the photos by date taken and they land in the right year folders — and every app you open them in agrees.

Dates that are wrong, not missing

Two cases look like missing dates but aren't:

• 1 January 1970, 1980 or 2000. A camera whose clock was never set, or reset when the battery died. FolioSort's Dates lists these under Suspicious dates, with dates in the future, so you can set the real one.
• A camera that was an hour — or a year — off. Every photo from it is wrong by the same amount. Find one photo whose real time you know, and shift all of that camera's photos by the difference in one go.

Back to the bigger plan: how to organize 20, 30 or 40 years of digital photos.

Questions people ask

Why do my scanned photos show the wrong date?

A scanner creates a new file, so the only date it can record is the day of the scan. Most scanners write no capture date at all, and computers then fall back to the file's creation or modification date. The photo from 1987 therefore sorts as the day you scanned it, until a real date is written into the file.

How do I change the date on a photo file?

Change the date taken stored inside the photo, called EXIF DateTimeOriginal, not the file's created or modified date, which most photo apps ignore. On Windows you can edit Date taken for one JPEG under Properties › Details. In Apple Photos, Image › Adjust Date and Time changes it inside the Photos library only. For many files at once, use a tool that writes EXIF dates in a batch and lets you undo it.

How can I tell when an old photo was taken?

Look for written clues first: a date stamp printed in the corner, handwriting or a lab's print date on the back, or the name of the album or envelope it came from. Then use context: who is in it and how old they look, cars, clothes and buildings, and the print's border and paper. Even a decade is worth recording, because a photo with an approximate date can still be sorted.

Can I date a photo when I only know the year?

Yes. EXIF needs a full date, so the usual convention is to write a neutral date inside that year and record that only the year is known. FolioSort writes 1 July at noon in EXIF and records only the year in XMP, so the file says what you actually know. A month-only date is written as the 15th at noon.

How do I fix the dates on WhatsApp photos?

WhatsApp removes the capture date from images it sends, but keeps the date in the file name, as in IMG-20190814-WA0001.jpg. A tool that reads dates from file names can write that day back into each photo's EXIF date in one batch, after which every app sorts them correctly.

What do photos dated 1 January 1970 or 1980 mean?

They come from a camera whose clock was never set, or that lost its setting when the battery ran out. The date is not missing, it is wrong, so tools that only fill missing dates leave it alone. List those photos separately and either set the real date or shift them all by the difference once you know one true date.