How to Find Out When a Picture Was Taken

A digital photo usually carries its own timestamp. The camera writes the date and time into the file the moment the shutter fires, and every major phone and computer can show it in a couple of taps. The harder question is whether to believe it, because the stamp is only as good as the clock that wrote it, and it can be changed afterwards.

This guide covers where the capture date lives and how to read it on each device, which of a photo’s several dates is the real one, why so many are wrong, and how to date a picture that has no metadata at all.

1. Step 1iPhone and iPadOpen the picture in Photos, then swipe up or tap the Info button. Apple lists the date and time it was taken alongside the device that captured it, with an Adjust option for the date. Everything else in that panel has its own guide.
2. Step 2AndroidIn Google Photos, open the picture and swipe up to see its date, time and details. Google notes one quirk: photos taken before 4 AM are sorted into the previous day, so a late-night shot can sit under the day before in your timeline.
3. Step 3WindowsRight-click the file, choose Properties, then open the Details tab. Microsoft’s Date taken property is read from the capture date the camera wrote into the file. Date created and Date modified, lower down, describe the file on your disk, not the photo. The Windows and Mac guide covers the rest of the tab.
4. Step 4MacFor a picture in the Photos app, select it and open the Info window from the toolbar. For a file outside your library, open it in Preview, press Command-I and look for Date Time Original in the Exif tab.
5. Step 5Any file, on any computerExifTool, a free command-line tool, prints every date a file holds: exiftool -time:all -a -G1 -s photo.jpg. It reads the file on your own computer instead of uploading it to a website, which matters for a photo that may also carry a location.

Reading the wrong row is an easy mistake. A picture saved from a chat or a website gets file dates when it lands on your device, and those dates say nothing about when it was taken. Even the embedded dates can describe a copy: metadata in the Reuters copy of a 2024 royal family photo said that version was created at 11:34 on 10 March, while BBC Verify found two Photoshop saves, on 8 and 9 March, in the metadata of another copy. What that photo’s file showed is a story of its own.

The study, by researchers at Yahoo Labs and Normandie University, compared each photo’s camera time with the time from its GPS data, converted to local time. Most were close: 60% differed by less than 10 minutes and 90% by less than a day. But 37% were out by more than an hour, the size of gap that a forgotten clock change or an unadjusted trip produces.

• A clock that was never set, or was reset. A camera keeps whatever time it is given, and the researchers note that its internal clock may reset itself when the batteries run out. Phones take the time from the network, unless someone sets the clock by hand.
• No time zone. Before Exif 2.31, published in 2016, the standard had no field for the offset from UTC. Older files record the camera’s local time with no zone attached, and software reading them later has to assume one.
• The date belongs to the app, not the file. Google Photos lets you edit a photo’s date and time, but warns that a shared or downloaded copy may show the original date and time saved by your camera.
• Someone changed it. iPhone Photos has Adjust Date & Time for one photo or a batch, with a Revert option; Photos on Mac has Image > Adjust Date and Time; free tools rewrite the EXIF fields directly.
• It is a new image. A screenshot or an exported edit is a new file with a date of its own. Screenshots keep far less metadata than the photo they show.

Whether the date survives depends on the route, not the phone: some services strip metadata and others pass the file on untouched. Which apps strip EXIF data goes through them one by one. Apple notes that a photo shared from its Photos app includes metadata such as the date and time, location and device; the app or service it passes through may still strip it. An original file can tell the recipient more than when it was taken.

1. Step 1Find the oldest copy onlineGoogle’s About this image shows when Google may have first seen the image or a similar version, and flags pages that used it much earlier than others. TinEye can sort matches by oldest, but it warns that this is the date its crawler found each copy, not the date the picture first went online.
2. Step 2Read the time from shadowsIf you know where a photo was taken, a tool such as SunCalc can match shadow length or direction to a time of day. In a Bellingcat test, a shadow measurement gave 09:37 for a photo whose EXIF data said 09:43, a six-minute gap. Bellingcat advises stating a time window rather than an exact time. The shadow method is covered step by step.
3. Step 3Check the weather and the seasonSnow, rain, bare trees or blossom narrow the months, and historical weather records for the place can confirm or rule out a claimed day.
4. Step 4Look for things that changeShop signs, advertising, cars and building work all date a scene. Google’s historical Street View imagery lets you see how a street looked at different times, and Street View coverage shows where that imagery exists.
5. Step 5Ask the sourceThe person who took the photo may still have the original file, with its capture date intact.

That case, reported by RFE/RL, shows the value of the check: the date in the files contradicted the story told about them. The weakness runs the other way too. Because the date is so easy to edit, a timestamp that matches a claim proves little on its own. Cross-check it against the shadows, the weather and the oldest copy online, as in how to verify if a photo is real.

Phone makers have started to sign the time. In Reference mode on the iPhone 18 Pro, the phone embeds a lower and an upper bound on the capture time from Apple’s cryptographic timestamp service, and Apple says it guarantees the photo was taken between the two; the lower bound is refreshed on average every 15 minutes. Google’s Pixel 10 supports trusted timestamps for the Content Credentials in its camera photos, even when the phone is offline. Neither helps with a photo taken any other way.

Photo analysis on geospys.com comes with GeoSpy Premium: 7.99 US dollars a week or 29.99 US dollars a year (₺389 or ₺1,460 in Türkiye), unlimited under fair use and cancellable at any time. See the yearly plan, or try the GeoSpy iPhone app, which has a free trial. GeoSpy estimates where a photo was taken, not when.