Fix Photo Dates After Copying From Your Phone
Copying photos from a phone to a computer often resets their dates to today. Why it happens, EXIF versus file dates, and how to fix the dates.
You plugged your phone into the computer, copied the camera roll to a folder, and every photo now shows today's date. Sorting by date gives you a random shuffle. Years of photos, apparently all taken this afternoon.
Why copying resets the dates
A file has dates of its own: created, modified, accessed. These belong to the filesystem, not to the photo. When a file is written to a new disk, the new disk records a new creation date, which is now. Whether the modified date survives depends on how the copy was made.
Phones make it worse. Android exposes its storage over MTP ("File transfer" mode), and MTP does not carry creation dates at all. Many transfers over MTP set the modified date to the copy time as well. AirDrop from an iPhone keeps dates on a Mac but not reliably elsewhere. Cloud downloads, email attachments and messaging apps all produce a fresh file with a fresh date.
None of this touches the photo itself. It only touches the wrapper the filesystem puts around it.
The date that survives
Inside the JPEG or HEIC is a block of EXIF metadata, written by the camera at the moment of capture. The field is called DateTimeOriginal. It does not change when the file is copied, emailed or renamed. It is the real date taken.
The trouble is that file managers, by default, sort by the filesystem date, not by EXIF. Explorer shows "Date modified". Finder shows "Date Modified" or "Date Created". Neither is the date the photo was taken unless someone has gone to the trouble of syncing them.
So the fix is one of two things. Either make your software sort by EXIF, or copy the EXIF date back onto the file's timestamps so that every program agrees. The full story of the three dates is in /blog/exif-date-taken-vs-file-modified.
Check whether the EXIF date is intact
Before fixing anything, confirm the real date is still in the files. Right-click a photo, open Properties on Windows or Get Info on macOS, and look for "Date taken" or the camera details. On Linux, exiftool -DateTimeOriginal photo.jpg prints it.
If the EXIF date is there, the fix is easy and lossless. If it is missing, the photo passed through something that strips metadata, usually a messaging app or a "save as" in an editor, and there is less to recover. /blog/whatsapp-photos-wrong-date-fix covers that case.
Fixing the file dates by hand
exiftool can copy the EXIF date onto the filesystem dates for a whole folder in one command:
exiftool "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" -r .On Windows and macOS you can also set the creation date:
exiftool "-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" -r .On Linux, most filesystems do not store a creation date that user programs can change, so the modified date is the one that counts.
After this, sorting by date in any file manager gives the right order. It costs nothing and changes no image data.
The reverse case, where the file dates are right and the EXIF is missing, is rarer but happens with edited or exported photos. exiftool can copy in that direction too, with "-DateTimeOriginal<FileModifyDate". Only do this if you are sure the file dates are correct, because it writes into the photo itself.
Avoiding it next time
On Android, a copy through a file-sync app such as Syncthing, or through the phone's own file manager onto a USB stick, tends to preserve modified dates better than MTP. On iPhone, Image Capture on a Mac keeps dates, as does the Windows Photos import. Neither is perfect. The reliable answer is not to care about file dates and to trust EXIF, which is what photo apps do.
Doing it with the app
Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer does the same thing as the exiftool commands above, for a folder or a whole export, with a dry run first.
Drop the copied folder onto it. For every photo it reads the EXIF date and writes it to the file's created and modified dates, so Finder and Explorer sort correctly. If you want, it also renames files to start with the date and sorts them into Year/Month folders, so the order is visible even in programs that ignore dates entirely.
It reorganizes a folder in place if you ask it to, with an optional "Originals (before organizing)" folder holding the untouched files. Videos get their date from their own creation-time metadata. Photos with no date at all fall back to the file date, or you can set one date for the folder.
If the photos came from Google Photos rather than straight off the phone, the app also reads the .json sidecars Google ships, which is where the real dates hide in that case. See /blog/google-takeout-photos-wrong-date.
Runs offline on macOS, Windows and Linux. Free for 500 photos. $9.99 one-time for unlimited.
Frequently asked questions
Did copying the photos destroy anything?
No. The image and its EXIF are unchanged. Only the filesystem dates around the file were reset, and those can be rebuilt from EXIF.
Why does my phone's gallery show the right order but my computer does not?
The gallery app on the phone reads EXIF, or its own database of capture times. Your computer's file manager reads filesystem dates. Same photos, different field.
Will Google Photos, iCloud or Immich use the wrong date if I upload these?
Usually not. All of them read EXIF first and fall back to the file date only when EXIF is missing. Photos with intact EXIF import correctly even with wrong file dates. Photos without EXIF will show the copy date, which is why fixing the missing ones before upload matters.
Does time zone matter?
EXIF DateTimeOriginal has no time zone in older photos. Newer phones add an OffsetTimeOriginal tag. When copying the date to file timestamps, tools assume the computer's local zone, so a photo taken abroad may shift by a few hours. The date is almost always still right.