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How to Change Date Taken on Photos in Windows 11

How to change date taken on photos in Windows 11: Properties, Details for JPEG, one or many at once, and what works for HEIC, videos and large sets.

To change Date taken on a photo in Windows 11, right-click the photo in File Explorer, choose Properties, open the Details tab, click the value next to Date taken, type the new date and time, and click OK. Select several photos first to give them all the same date. This works for JPEG files only. For HEIC, PNG, videos, or different dates for many photos, use exiftool or a desktop app.

Change Date taken of one photo

  1. Open the folder in File Explorer.
  2. Right-click the photo and choose Properties.
  3. Open the Details tab.
  4. Under Origin, move the mouse over the value next to Date taken and click it. A date field and a time field appear.
  5. Type the date, then the time, or pick the date from the calendar.
  6. Click OK.

Windows writes the new date into the photo's EXIF data, the same place a camera writes it. Photos, OneDrive, Google Photos, iCloud and Immich read it from there. Because Windows saves the file, its Date modified becomes today.

If the field cannot be clicked, the file is not a JPEG, or it is read-only. Check Read-only on the General tab.

Change Date taken of several photos at once

  1. Select the photos: Ctrl-click each one, or Ctrl+A for the whole folder.
  2. Right-click one of them and choose Properties, then Details.
  3. Set Date taken and click OK.

Every selected JPEG gets the same date and time. That is right for a set of scans from one event. It is wrong for a set of photos taken over several days, because their order within the set is lost. For those, shift the dates instead, as shown below.

Why it does not work for HEIC, PNG or videos

File Explorer can write Date taken only into formats whose metadata Windows knows how to edit, which in practice means JPEG. HEIC photos from iPhones show Date taken but the field is read-only. PNG screenshots usually have no Date taken at all. Videos show Media created, which File Explorer cannot change either.

For these files, exiftool works:

  1. Download the Windows package from exiftool.org and unpack it.
  2. Rename exiftool(-k).exe to exiftool.exe and keep it with its exiftool_files folder.
  3. Open Terminal in that folder and run, with your own path and date:
.\exiftool.exe "-AllDates=2019:07:14 15:30:00" "C:\Users\You\Pictures\IMG_0412.HEIC"

AllDates sets the three EXIF dates at once: DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate and ModifyDate. exiftool keeps a copy of the original file with _original at the end of its name, unless you add -overwrite_original.

Shift the dates of many photos

When a camera's clock was wrong, every photo is off by the same amount. Shift them all and their order stays correct. To add one year and two hours to every photo in a folder:

.\exiftool.exe "-AllDates+=1:0:0 2:0:0" "C:\Users\You\Pictures\Camera 2019"

The format is years:months:days hours:minutes:seconds. Use -= to go back in time. This works on JPEG, HEIC and most RAW files. For MP4 and MOV videos, add -api QuickTimeUTC, because video files store their dates in UTC.

Photos that show the copy date after copying from a phone

You copied the camera roll to the PC and every photo shows today. Usually nothing is wrong inside the photos. Copying made new files with new file dates, but Date taken, inside each photo, is unchanged.

Add the Date taken column in File Explorer (right-click a column heading) and sort by it. If the column is filled, the photos are fine. To make the file dates match as well, copy Date taken into them:

.\exiftool.exe "-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" -r "C:\Users\You\Pictures\Phone"

How to change date created on photos in Windows 11 explains the file dates in detail.

If the Date taken column is empty, the photos came through something that removed it: WhatsApp, a messaging app, or a download. WhatsApp photos have the wrong date shows how to recover dates from file names.

Photos from Google Takeout

After a Google Takeout export, many photos have no Date taken, and the real date is in the .json file beside each one. Typing thousands of dates by hand is not an option. How to fix Google Takeout dates on Windows shows how to write them in from the .json files.

The app

The easiest way to change Date taken on Windows 11 for a whole folder, with different dates per photo, is Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer. It is a desktop app from the Microsoft Store: pick the folder, press Start, done. No command line, no exiftool.

It takes the real date from Google Takeout .json files, from the date already inside each photo, or from a date and place you set by hand for a folder. It writes Date taken into JPEG photos and converts HEIC to JPG (on by default) so they get Date taken too. For every file, videos included, it sets Date created and Date modified to the date taken, so File Explorer sorts them correctly. It can also rename photos by date and place and sort them into year/month folders in the same run. A dry run shows the plan first. It runs offline. The first 500 photos are free, and Premium is $19.99 once.

Frequently asked questions

Does changing Date taken reduce photo quality?

No. Windows and exiftool rewrite only the metadata. The image data stays the same.

Why is Date taken empty for some photos?

Screenshots, images from chat apps, downloads and many scans have no Date taken. Why photos show no date lists the cases.

Can I undo a change?

Only if you kept a copy. exiftool keeps _original files by default. File Explorer keeps nothing, so copy the folder before you change a large set.

Does time zone matter?

EXIF Date taken stores local time with no time zone. Type the time as it was where the photo was taken.

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