Photo Date Checker
Find out when a photo was really taken: the date the camera recorded, not the date the file was copied.
or browse filesdrop a photo here or paste
Find out when a photo was really taken: the date the camera recorded, not the date the file was copied.
or browse filesdrop a photo here or paste
A file has two dates and they are rarely the same. The one Windows or macOS shows is when this copy landed on the disk - it changes every time the photo is copied, downloaded, sent over chat or restored from a backup. The one that matters is the date the camera wrote inside the photo when the shutter fired, and that one travels with the file. Drop the picture here and the page reads that date directly out of the metadata, on your own device, and says in plain language when the shot was taken.
The answer card gives the camera's date as a readable sentence - the weekday, the date, the time to the second and how long ago that was. Below it, the rows list every date the file carries: the original, the digitized date, the modified date some editors write, the GPS timestamp from the satellite fix, and the file-system date of the copy you are holding. When the file date and the camera date disagree by more than a day, the page says so and explains which one to trust - that mismatch is the whole reason people go looking.
A camera date is written by the device that took the picture, so it is strong evidence of when a shot happened - useful for insurance claims, disputes, archives and sorting a shoebox of holiday photos. It is not tamper-proof: a wrong clock in the camera records a wrong date, and editing software can rewrite the field. The tool shows the software that last touched the file for exactly that reason, so you can see when a photo has been through an editor.
Screenshots have none - they were never captured by a camera. Images downloaded from social networks usually have none either, because the platforms strip metadata on upload. Many editors drop it when exporting. The page says so honestly rather than inventing an answer, and still shows the file's own date for what it is worth. To read everything else a photo carries, use the EXIF viewer; to see where it was taken, the photo location viewer; to burn the date onto the picture itself, add timestamp.
Load the photo on this page. The camera's own date appears immediately, written out in full, along with every other date the file carries. Nothing is uploaded.
Because they measure different things. The file date is when this copy was written to your disk - downloading, copying or syncing all reset it. The camera date is stored inside the photo and does not change when the file moves.
Yes, in the sense that any metadata can be edited, and a camera with a wrong clock records a wrong time. That is why the page also shows the editing software that touched the file. For everyday questions - which holiday this was, whether a photo predates an event - the camera date is reliable.
Screenshots are created by the device, not captured by a camera, so no EXIF date is written. The same applies to most images exported by editors and everything downloaded from social media.
Yes. RAW files are TIFF containers, so DNG, CR2, NEF and ARW files give up their date the same way, even though the browser cannot display the picture itself.
No. The file is parsed in your browser on your device, and nothing is transmitted.