When was this photo taken? How to find the date

On the screen a boy in a red raincoat stands at the edge of a pond. Your son, but which year? He looks four, or six. The file is called IMG_0412.jpg and the folder says it was made last spring, which cannot be right. The date is there, though. It is just not where you are looking.

The short answer

A photo taken with a digital camera or a phone carries the moment it was taken inside the file, in a field called Date taken (for the technically minded: EXIF DateTimeOriginal). The date you see in a folder is usually something else: the day the file was copied or downloaded. So look for Date taken.

Where to find the date taken

Device	How
iPhone or iPad	Open the photo and swipe up, or tap the (i). You see the date, time and often the place.
Android	Open the photo in Google Photos and swipe up, or tap the three dots and choose Details.
Windows	Right click the file, choose Properties, then the Details tab. Look for Date taken.
Mac	Open the photo in Preview, choose Tools, then Show Inspector, and look at the Exif tab.

When the date is wrong or missing

• Scans. A scanner makes a new file on the day of scanning. The date inside is the day you scanned it, not the day it was taken.
• Forwarded photos. Messaging apps and some social networks strip information from the file. The photo you received often carries the day you received it.
• A camera with the wrong clock. If the clock of an old digital camera was never set, every photo from it may say 1 January of some year. The dates are then wrong by the same amount, so the order is still right.
• The file name. Many phones put the date in the name, such as 20090814_153210.jpg. That is often a good clue when the date taken is gone.

For photos on paper there is no file to read. Then the photo itself is your clue: clothes, hairstyles, cars, the shape and edge of the print. Read how to date an old photograph and find out who is in it.

The dates of thousands of photos at once

One photo at a time works for a boy in a raincoat. For a whole folder, or twenty years of phone photos, you want to see all the dates together. Drag the folder onto thememorypalace.ai/timeline. Your browser reads only the date taken from each file, up to 5,000 at a time, and shows how many photos there are per year, which years they span and which runs of years have no photo at all. Photos without a date taken, such as most scans, are counted separately. Nothing is uploaded, and you do not need an account.

The empty years are often the interesting part. They usually point to an old phone, a memory card, a CD in a drawer, or photos that are with someone else in the family. Our article on finding the digital photos from the 2000s helps you look for them.

A date is a start

Once you know the boy in the raincoat was five, the next question is the one that matters: which pond, and who took the picture. Write it down while someone still knows. In The Memory Palace each photo gets its year, its place and the story that goes with it, in a room the whole family can walk through.