When you download photos from Facebook, Pinterest, or WhatsApp, they often lose their original ‘Date Taken’ metadata, leaving your photo library in a chronological mess. Without an accurate timestamp, even the best photo management software can’t organize your memories. This guide walkthrough 5 easy ways to change photo dates using tools like XnView MP, Adobe Lightroom, and built-in features in Windows and macOS, so you can restore order to your digital collection.
Every time I look through my digital library, I rely on a chronological timeline to find my favorite memories. However, when you download images from Pinterest, Facebook, or WhatsApp, that timeline breaks because the original metadata is stripped away. I have found that without an accurate timestamp, your organization system simply falls apart. In this guide, I will show you exactly how to change photo date metadata on any platform—restoring order to your collection and ensuring your pictures stay exactly where they belong in your history.
Where is the Photo Timestamp?
Before learning how to change photo date and time, you need to know what a digital photo date and time is. This piece of the photo metadata is called the photo’s timestamp. Every camera records when a digital photo has been taken. This information is being recorded in the EXIF photo metadata portion and it is saved with a JPEG photo in a field called Date Picture Taken. Now, different software may call this field slightly differently, but they all refer to a digital photo’s timestamp.
There are several dates inside the EXIF metadata associated with a photo. The most important field, and the one you need to check is Date Taken. Other dates like File creation date, or digitization date, or others are not important when it comes to photo management software. All photo managers look for the field called Date Taken, inside the EXIF portion of image metadata.
One easy and free tool to edit EXIF data is XnView MP. You can download XnView MP from here.
1. Change Photo Date with XnView
Before we can attempt to change a photo date and time, we need to know what metadata is present in this photo. With XnView MP it’s easy to check.
a. Verify photo time stamp with XnView
Here is how to verify EXIF image metadata you already have:
- In thumbnails view, select the Thumbnails + Label view where some EXIF metadata will be displayed
- Check the two date fields: the first one is Date Modified and the second is Date Taken. Make sure at least the second one is correct. If not, follow the steps below to change photo date accordingly.
Check the EXIF metadata using XnView MP
b. Change Photo Timestamp with XnView
Perform EXIF Date Change with XnView MP
Here are the steps to change photo date with XnView MP.
- Select the thumbnail of the image ( don’t double-click)
- Go to the menu toolbar and select Tools / Change timestamp
- Check the checkbox to generate EXIF record,
- Choose specific date and enter the date using the calendar provided.
- Check the Generate EXIF Metadata if you don’t have any photo metadata. You know that you don’t have metadata if the fields in section 3 are empty. This would be the case especially for scanned photos
- Select the fields you want modified. My suggestion is to select all the EXIF fields so they would all have the photo creation date. I would leave the File: Modified date unchecked as that is a file system property and not an image property.
- Press the Write button as in my screenshot.
c. Verify Corrected Photo Timestamp with XnView
Now that you have created the missing EXIF record and inserted the correct date and time, you should have the Date Taken field in your photo’s EXIF metadata. But, it’s always good to verify. So, let’s check if we fixed our digital photo’s timestamp.
Verify the EXIF Date Taken is correct in XnView
As you can see, this picture has Date Taken now. This means that if you upload this image to Google Photos, or Photos, it will be displayed correctly according to when the photo was taken.
2. Change Photo Date with Adobe Lightroom
Lightroom also allows you to change a photo’s date and time.
The process for changing a photo’s Date Taken field with Lightroom is easy:
- Make sure you are in the Library module.
- Select the photo you want to change
- Click the edit button next to the date field in the metadata panel on the right
- Choose your new date
- Press Change.
How to change photo timestamp in Adobe Lightroom
In Adobe Lightroom, once you change a photo’s date and time stamps, the information appears immediately in the same place you started editing. This way you can immediately verify the changes you made to a photo’s date and time.
6 video modules - over 30 videos containing step-by-step instructions for Windows or Mac programs like Lightroom, ACDSee, Picasa and Photos.
All my e-Books for free - all my products are included.
Completely self-paced. Learn at your own pace and take as long as you want until you learn how to organize your photos. More info
With Adobe Lightroom you can also select multiple photos and change all selected photo date and time in bulk. Just select multiple photos and follow the same procedure.
However, it looks like a change in time is applied only to the first photo in your bulk selection while the date is applied to all selected photos. In addition to the classic Lightroom photo manager, Adobe also provides the Lightroom Mobile phone application, that also allows you to change a limited subset of the photo metadata straight from your phone.
3. Change Photo Date with Mac Photos
On macOs you can also change EXIF date and time using the included Photos application.
Start by selecting the photo you want to change. Then follow these steps :
- Press the “i” bottom on the top right. It stands for “information”.
- Double click the date and time field.
- Change the date and time in the Adjusted field.
- Change GPS location information if it needs correction.
- Press the Adjust button.
Change photo date and time in Mac Photos
These changes to date and time will be available when you choose to move pictures from Photos and export them to a folder outside the application.
4. Change Photo Date with Windows File Explorer
Windows 10 (and Windows 7) also allows you to change the timestamp for a digital image. The process is simple as well.
It all starts by selecting the folder containing your photo. Then follow these steps:
- Select the photo you want to change, right-click the photo and choose Properties
- Click the Details tab
- Under Date Taken you can simply enter the date or click the calendar icon. Notice that you cannot change the time.
- Press Apply
- Press OK
How to change photo date stamp in Windows’ File Explorer
Once changed, you can easily verify if the date taken is correct by right-clicking on the image again, choose Properties and verify the Details tab that the Date Taken field has the correct date.
With Windows Explorer, you can also select multiple photos and change all selected photo date in bulk. Just select multiple photos and follow the same procedure as listed above.
5. Change Photo Date with ACDSee Photo Studio
ACDSee Photo Studio Professional (one of my favorite photo management programs) version allows you to select multiple photos and then change their data and time straight into the EXIF portion of the photo metadata. This is very convenient and easy to use.
Change EXIF Date Time with ACDSee Photo Studio
Here is how to perform EXIF date change with ACDSee Photo Studio:
- Open ACDSee Photo Studio in Manage module
- Select the photos you want to change timestamp for.
- Expand the EXIF metadata section on the panel on the right.
- Scroll down until you find two fields: Date/Time Original and Date/Time Digitized.
- Use the handy screens to set both of these fields to the date when the photo was taken.
Should You Change Photo Date?
Answering this question really depends on you, the user. Personally, I rarely change any photo’s date since I really want the correct timestamp in each digital photo. This photo timestamp is crucial for being able to organize my pictures on my computer. Without an accurate photo timestamp, my organization system doesn’t work properly. If somehow, photo dates are incorrect, I usually check the camera device I have used and make sure it records photo timestamps correctly.
Essentials for organizing your digital photos
Here are the essential products and services I have come to rely on for many years to keep my media collection organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them. 
Excellent Lightroom alternative. If you need a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac or ACDSee Photo Studio Professional for Windows is my preferred solution for organizing all my media. It has a very fast browser, great image editing and it's simple to use.
If you do a lot of image editing like I do, I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom has best photo editing capabilities even though it has a steeper learning curve. Adobe Lightroom is my favorite for image editing.
I recommend Backblaze Personal Cloud Backup for affordable & reliable unlimited cloud backup. I have been using Backblaze for backing up all pictures & videos for more than 5 years now. All my invaluable digital memories are safe and secure. This is the best solution especially if you have a large quantity of media files.
Use a reliable & affordable external hard drive for backing up everything on your computer. It is absolutely essential for keeping all your memories backed up and safe.
Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed) Independent Course Private Lessons
Reference book Basics book
YOURS FREE! 10 crucial steps most people miss when organizing their digital photos
Most people want to just organize their digital pictures and ignore these crucial steps right at the beginning...when they are shooting and transferring their digital pictures. Then they wonder why they can't organize their digital photos! Avoid most people's mistakes and start on the right track!
I am an 81 yr. old artist in watercolor. Every show I enter requires pixels in different sizes, which I have to re-size each time I enter the show. While I can mostly do that, the hardest thing for me to do is to change the date I took the photo (years ago) to a more recent date within 2 years to qualify for the show.
I am not fully computer literate in editing, and all the recommended apps I see are far more complicated that what I need: crop and edit for saturation/brightness, re-sizing and changing the original date of the photo. Way too many features for me that I will never use.
I’m using Google Photos on a PC maybe 6 yrs. old. Got MS too, and I did great with old MS Paint which simplified these tasks. Maybe the simplest way to go is backward to using the old version of MS Paint?
Help,
Jan
janfit@gmail.com
Jan…good question! In Google Photos double click the photo for which you want to change the date. When it comes up full screen, on the top right there is an “I” button (stands for information). Click that and now you can see all the properties of the photo. Next to the date, there is a small “PEN” symbol. Click that and now you can edit the date of the photo. Hope this helps.
Thanks so much! I have older photos that have been transferred from computer to computer over 20 years. The modify date is actually the create date. Somewhere, they got switched. So this has helped me make corrections to anything that is wrong. I’m using Mac Photos to make the changes.
Jujubees…glad to hear you found help on editing your photos Metadata. And thank you for coming back to enter a comment.
Vlad, Thank you so much for your guidance. I was able to use XnView MP to modify a batch of jpegs that had the wrong date thanks my inadvertent setting of my camera’s clock to 2025.
Eric…glad to hear my article has helped you fix Metadata errors in your files.
I couldn’t download and install XnView MP as much as I wanted to because I was being forced to install other things first that I didn’t want such as WaveBrowser but it would never move on to installing XNView PM.
I thought I’d update what I had said earlier. I was subsequently able to download and install XnViewMP via the below website where it didn’t try to force me to install other software products or browser addons, etc.
I have then used it several times since then following the instructions in this link. I have to remember each time to *not* double click on the highlighted file.
Thank you for these helpful instructions.
Keith…thank you for the link, but my original link from the article takes you to the official XnView download page…just scroll down and pick your operating system.
Keith…Not sure what happened, maybe an add with download came up which is unfortunate. I verified the link I provided for XnView download and it’s the official webpage…you just have to scroll down until you get to Windows, Mac and Linux where you can click on the specific operating system you’re using. It should not ask you to install anything else.
I’m using the XNview MP on mac and can’t see the File: Creation date option to tick for modification to EXIF data. Any idea why this is? I’ve searched the forums and still can’t find an answer!
XnView was the perfect help to add 1 hour to all of my DSLR pictures. Select them click on “Tools”-“change time”. Done. Easy. Now they are chronological in Google Photos, thank you very much!
Fabian…Glad to hear my article helped you to edit your photos metadata. And thank you for coming back to my site and adding a comment!
I tried using your method to edit Date Taken with XnView MP. The screens look nothing like that. As far as I can tell, there is no way to edit Date Taken with that software. Totally useless.
Doesn’t Matter…My XnView uses Dark theme and it is true that this screenshot is from an older version and it’s slightly different than the latest version. However, the steps outlined in the article are correct and not useless. Based on your comments, I have updated the screenshot from the latest XnView version and clarified one step. Hope this helps better now. However, all my screenshots will eventually become obsolete.
Flickr refuses to organize my photos in the order that they were uploaded. I even created the order I wanted and had them renamed beginning with 0001. No luck. My photos are digitized photographs of prints, old slides, etc. Flickr will organize an album by the date taken. I understand from your article that I can change the DATE TAKEN in its exif location. Is there a batch method that would change the dates of all the images in a folder so that each image would have a slightly later date? I believe this would solve the problem as they could be sorted by the date taken after they are collected in an album within Flickr. Another example: I photograph vintage prints and shoot one photo of the front and another photo of the back showing the names of the those in the photograph. These photos must stay together when saved and uploaded into Flickr album. It is almost impossible to Drag and drop these photos after they are mixed. I believe if I were to upload just two photographs at a time, Flicker would create countless separate albums. Not cool!
I have access to the xnview programs, Lightroom, Photoshop, photo mechanic, and a few other photo related software. I use Mac OS. I suppose someone smarter than I am could write a script of some sort.
In any event, thank you for your efforts and sharing along these lines.
Bruce…Flickr probably organizes based on Date Picture Taken field in the EXIF metadata portion of your photo files. For scanned photos, as you know, there is no metadata. You can try selecting multiple photos and use XnView or Lightroom and see if you can change the Date Photo Taken date.
To keep front and back of the photos together, one suggestion is to use the same exact timestamp in addition to the same date. This means changing the date on the photo file and include the hour and time all the way to seconds. If you match it for both front and back…they should stay together in most programs.
Hi Bruce! If you still have the problem you can overcome it with bulkfilechanger from http://www.nirsoft.net. You can change date taken with an increase value of for example a minute for each picture selected. I use it for scanned slides to store them in Google Photos and keep the sort order.
Hi. I was just wondering. Is there a way to do this in batches?? I have done some of those methods, and I had to do it one at a time.
Lightroom, ACDSee Photo Studio and Windows File Explorer allow you to select multiple photos at the same time and follow my process to change the date metadata for all selected photos.