Change the date taken on many photos at once

How to use it#

1. Drop the photos onto the Photos list, or click it to choose them. JPG, HEIC, PNG, WebP, and AVIF all work, and each row shows the date it has now.
2. Choose By an amount and set how many years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds the dates are out, and whether they move later or earlier.
3. Or choose To match a photo, pick a photo whose real time you know, and type that time. Every photo moves by the same difference.
4. Or choose To a set time and type the date and time every photo should have. Photos with no date get it too.
5. Check the new dates in the list, then download the photos one by one or all at once as a ZIP.

When a whole set of photos has the wrong time#

A camera stamps every photo with the time on its own clock, and it has no idea where it is. Take it abroad without changing the clock and a week of photos is hours out. Forget the change to or from daylight saving and everything is off by an hour. After a battery change, some cameras reset to a date years in the past. The error is the same on every photo, so the fix is the same too: one amount added to all of them.

The other common case is two cameras at one event. A phone sets its own clock over the network, and a camera is only as right as whoever last set it, so when their photos are merged into one album they interleave in the wrong order. Moving the camera’s photos to match the phone puts them back into the order they were taken.

By an amount, to match a photo, or to a set time#

By an amount suits a known error, such as a time zone. A camera left on London time in Cape Town is one or two hours behind depending on the season. In New York it is usually five hours ahead, so move the dates earlier. The line under the settings says in words what the total comes to, such as 7 hours later, so a wrong direction is caught before you download. Years moves each photo to the same day and time in another year, for a camera that reset to a date long past, and a 29 February that lands in a year without one becomes the 28th.

To match a photo suits an error you do not know. Pick a photo whose real time you can tell, such as one of a clock, a departure board, or a moment a friend’s phone also caught, and type when it was really taken. The page works out the difference and moves every other photo by it. For an exact figure, photograph your phone’s clock with the camera: the photo’s date against the time on its screen is the error to the second.

To a set time suits photos you know were all taken at one moment, such as a set of scans of one old print, or pictures from an evening whose time you remember. Every photo gets exactly the date and time you type, so they tie in a photo library rather than keeping their order. A photo with no date at all gets one this way too, which neither of the other two can do, since there is no date for them to move.

What changes in the file, and what does not#

Three dates move together: the date taken, the date digitised that most cameras write beside it, and the date the file was last changed. Photos that have been through an editor often repeat the date in XMP and IPTC blocks as well, and those copies move by the same amount, so no program goes on showing the old time. The one exception is XMP that an editor stored compressed in a PNG, or spread over extra JPG segments because it was too long for one, which is left as it was. The time zone a newer camera records is left as it was, and so is the GPS time, which comes from the satellites and is already right.

A new date takes exactly as many characters as the old one, so the page writes the new digits over the old ones and nothing else in the file moves. The picture is not re-saved and loses nothing, and the camera’s maker notes, captions, keywords, and location stay byte for byte. That is also why an iPhone HEIC can be changed here, even though a browser cannot rewrite one: the file is never taken apart. The one exception is a photo that had no date and gets one from To a set time. There are no digits to write over, so its EXIF is written afresh, and any maker notes in it are left out, as the EXIF editor does.