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.
Dating a paper photo by decade or by type
A print has no date inside it, but every decade left its own traces: the format, the border, the paper, the clothes. These guides go through them one decade and one photo type at a time.
- The 1900s (1900 to 1909)
- The 1910s (1910 to 1919)
- The 1920s (1920 to 1929)
- The 1930s (1930 to 1939)
- The 1940s (1940 to 1949)
- The 1950s (1950 to 1959)
- The 1960s (1960 to 1969)
- The 1970s (1970 to 1979)
- The 1980s (1980 to 1989)
- The 1990s (1990 to 1999)
- Cabinet cards and cartes de visite
- Polaroid and instant photos
- Slides: Kodachrome and Ektachrome
- Colour prints and negatives
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.
Once your own photos have their years, our guides on keeping your own memories privately help you decide where they live next.