OneDrive changing the dates on my photos?!?!?

Hello Chad,

While the issue you described seems more related to OneDrive rather than Windows Photo Gallery, let me see if I could be of help. In Windows Explorer, right click on one of your photo files and select Properties in the context menu. In the File Properties dialog, click on the Details tab. Does the Date Taken attribute has a value on it? If so, is it the expected value? 

Date Created and Date Modified are file attributes which can be easily modified by OS or application operations. For example, copying a file to another server, say by FTP, may change those two values.

Date Taken, on the other hand, is a value which is stored within the file as embedded metadata and "travels" with it. Unfortunately, some web services will "strip" this information on transfer.

To the best of my knowledge and experience with OneDrive, it maintains file integrity and does not arbitrarily change the Date Taken value.

Were the files downloaded from a site or transferred directly to the PC from a camera or smartphone?

J Oliver, thank you for your response and I appreciate that you understand this issue.  Looking at my photos (most taken from iPhones over the years), the Date Taken field is blank.  The only fields that the iPhone appears to have filled out was the Date Created and Date Modified fields.  The Date Created and Date Modified fields were the fields that OneDrive arbitrarily reset to the current date upon upload.

Why is that many pictures uploaded to OneDrive untouched, while several it modified those fields?  I've never seen a cloud service do this, and I've tried several.

The pictures were taken directly from my iPhones, many different models, over the years and stored in dated folders on Winodows Explorer.

I still do not suspect OneDrive is the culprit in this case, as it would need to change the value from within the file itself. Did you modify those photos at any point in time with a photo editor or tool?

Some time ago I downloaded a photo editing app, it ended stripping metadata upon edit. As another example, Facebook does remove the file's embedded metadata. As such it is not a good photo backup option.

You mentioned that the photos were organized in dated folders, also some dated back from 1999. If they were acquired from a scanner, most likely they do not have the Date Taken field added to them. Does the filename contain a date? Say 20180504.jpg? I am thinking of trying to restore the Date Taken with a batch command.

J Oliver,

The reason that I know OneDrive is responsible for changing the metadata is, I have a copy of my original photos and folders on an external drive.  When I noticed that about 10%-20% of my 45,000 photos were redated, I compared them to my external drive backup.  The same photos that were redated on upload by OneDrive retained their original dates on the external drive.  If I had not saved an external backup, separate from the OneDrive folder on Windows Explorer, than I would have had no way to bring back the original dating.

Most of the photos that were redated were from iPhone pictures that I dragged from the iPhone in Windows Explorer, to folders I setup and dated.  There were also Canon DSLR photos and some scans as well.  Like you said, the redating affect seems to be arbitrary in nature, as it happened with different pictures from different sources and times.  

Good that you had a backup!

I am backing up my photos and metadata as well. After quite some effort in adding captions, tags and other info, I would hate for such scenario to happen.

J Oliver,

I am most concerned that, if this random OneDrive redating continues, that someday ill look at my pictures and there will be hundreds that are redated again.  Its like i cant feel confident that Microsoft will keep my files intact, and if there’s not something done about it i will have no choice but to move to a different, more stable cloud service.

Is there something you can do on your end, or send it up to someone, that can find the issue here and fix it?  I would be so relieved to know that this issue has been resolved and that OneDrive will no longer change Date Created and Date Modified when uploading pictures to the cloud.

Thank you.

One more thing.

Do you have OneDrive Files On Demand enabled?

I did a quick test:

1. Enabled OneDrive Files On Demand

2. Selected a Photo file with Date Taken metadata and right clicked on it, selected Free Up Space.

Upon sync, the date taken field was empty.