How to Fix the Wrong Date Taken on a Whole Batch of Photos

You come home from a trip with photos from a phone and a camera. In the photo app, the camera’s photos are all in the wrong place: the sunset before the lunch, or the whole trip filed under 2019. The camera’s clock was wrong.

The good news is that it was wrong by the same amount in every photo. One correction fixes all of them.

Why it happens

A phone takes its time from the network and changes zone when you land. A camera knows only what you typed into its menu. The usual causes:

The wrong time zone. The camera stayed on home time while you travelled. The photos are out by a round number of hours, or by 5 hours 30 minutes if India is one end of the trip.
Daylight saving. Out by exactly one hour, for half the year.
A clock that was never set, or that reset when the battery ran flat. These photos are usually out by years, and carry a date near the camera’s release.

Photo apps sort by the date taken, which the camera writes inside the file. They ignore the “created” date your computer shows, because that is only the day the file was copied. So renaming the files or changing the file date does nothing. The date inside the file has to change.

Step 1: work out the difference

Find one photo from the camera whose real time you know:

a photo of a station clock, a departure board or a receipt
a moment you also took on your phone, which has the right time
a sunset or a timed event, which you can look up

Compare the real time with the date the photo carries. If the phone says 18:40 and the camera says 13:10, the camera is 5 hours 30 minutes behind, so the photos need to move later by 5 hours 30 minutes.

What you see	Likely cause	Shift
Out by whole hours	Camera on the wrong time zone	Later or earlier by that many hours
Out by hours and 30 minutes	A zone such as India (UTC+5:30) at one end	For example, later by 5 h 30 min
Out by exactly 1 hour	Daylight saving not set	1 hour
Out by years	Clock never set, or reset	The days, hours and minutes between the two dates

For a clock that is out by years, take the difference in whole days first, then the hours and minutes. The tool accepts up to 36,500 days, which is a hundred years.

Step 2: shift the batch

Open the photo date changer and add every photo from that camera. Each one shows the date it currently carries.
Choose Change dates only.
Pick Later or Earlier, and enter the days, hours and minutes. The page shows a preview of the new date before you commit.
Press download. The corrected copies come in a zip (a single photo downloads as it is), with “redated” added to each name.

Your originals are untouched, so if the result is an hour out, delete the copies and run it again.

The shift moves all three dates a camera writes: date taken, date digitised and date modified. Nothing else in the file changes. The picture data is copied as it is, so there is no quality loss, and the location and camera details stay in place. The photos are never uploaded; the work happens in your browser.

What it does not do

JPEG only. Date shifting works on JPEG files. PNG and WebP files rarely carry a camera date, and HEIC is not supported yet. RAW files are not handled either; fix those in your RAW software, or export JPEGs first.
No exact dates. Every photo moves by the same amount. That is deliberate: it keeps the gaps between photos true, which setting one date on a whole batch would destroy.
A photo with no date is skipped. A scan or a screenshot saved as a JPEG often has no date taken at all, so there is nothing to move. The list says so beside that file.

Two cameras, one trip

Correct each camera on its own. Two cameras are never wrong by the same amount, so sort the files by camera first; the tool shows the make and model beside each photo, which makes that easy. Once both sets are shifted, they fall into one timeline with the phone photos.

Before you import

Do the shift before the photos go into your photo library. Most libraries read the date once, at import, and do not notice a file that changes later. If the photos are already imported, remove them, import the corrected copies, and check the first and last photo against what you remember.

If you want the location gone too

Changing dates keeps everything else, including the GPS coordinates. To shift the dates and remove the location in one pass, choose Location only and enter the same shift. For what else a photo carries and when it matters, see how to remove the location from a photo.

Questions people ask

How do I change the date taken on multiple photos at once?

Add them all to the date changer, choose Change dates only, and enter the days, hours and minutes to move the time by, later or earlier. Every photo moves by the same amount and downloads as a copy in a zip. The originals are not changed.

Why do my camera photos sort in the wrong order with my phone photos?

Photo apps sort by the date taken written inside each file. A phone sets its clock from the network, but a camera only knows what you told it. If the camera was still on home time during a trip, or was never set, its photos land hours or years away from the phone's.

Which date does a photo app use?

The date taken stored in the photo's EXIF data, not the created or modified date your computer shows for the file. That is why renaming or copying the file changes nothing, and why the fix has to be made inside the file.

Will changing the date reduce the quality of the photo?

No. Only the date stamps inside the file's metadata are rewritten. The picture data is copied unchanged, and the location, camera details and everything else stay exactly as they were.

Can I set an exact date instead of shifting?

Not with this tool yet. It moves every photo by the same amount, which is what a wrong clock needs. To land a photo on an exact time, subtract the date it shows from the real one and enter the difference.

The camera clock was wrong: how to fix the date on a whole batch of photos

The short answer