How to put photos from two cameras or phones into one timeline
The short answer
To merge photos from two cameras into one timeline, pick a moment both cameras photographed, such as a toast or a sunset, and compare the date taken on each. The difference is the offset. Shift every photo from the wrong camera by that amount, keeping the phone as the reference because phones set their clocks from the network. After the shift, any photo app sorts both sets into the right order.
After a wedding, a holiday or a family event, you collect photos from everyone: your phone, a partner’s phone, a friend’s camera. Put them in one album and they come out in the wrong order. The speeches appear before the ceremony. Sunset lands at lunchtime. Nothing is wrong with the photos. Their clocks disagreed.
Why they fall out of order
Every photo app sorts by the date taken written inside each file, not by the order you added them. Phones set their clocks from the mobile network, so they are almost always right. A dedicated camera keeps its own clock, and nobody resets it. It drifts by minutes a year, it stays on home time when you travel, and it may never have been set at all.
So a camera five minutes fast puts every photo five minutes late in the timeline. One on home time during a trip to India puts every photo hours out.
Step 1: pick a shared moment
Find one event that both cameras photographed, and that happened at a single instant:
- a toast, a first kiss, a cake being cut
- a sunset or a firework
- a sign, a clock or a departure board in the frame
- a group photo taken by one person on both cameras
The more sudden the moment, the more accurate the result. A slow walk down an aisle is harder to match to the second than a champagne cork.
Step 2: read both times
Open the date changer and add one photo of the moment from each camera. Each shows the date it currently carries. Photos are read by your own browser and are never uploaded.
Say the phone shows 16:42 and the camera shows 16:49. The camera is seven minutes fast. That is the offset.
Step 3: choose the reference
Leave the phone’s photos alone and move the camera’s to match. If there are three sources, pick the one you trust most, normally a phone, and work out each of the others against it separately. Each camera will be out by a different amount.
Step 4: shift the whole batch
- Add every photo from the camera that needs correcting.
- Choose Change dates only.
- Enter the shift: in the example, take away 7 minutes.
- Download the corrected copies. A batch comes as a zip.
Every date the camera wrote moves by the same amount: date taken, date digitised and date modified. Nothing else in the file changes, including the picture. The originals are untouched, so if the result is not right you can try again.
Step 5: check it
Put the corrected copies and the reference photos in one album. Scroll to the shared moment. The two cameras’ shots should now sit side by side. If they are still apart, compare them again and adjust by the remainder.
Common offsets
| What you see | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| A few minutes | Clock drift |
| A whole number of hours | Camera on the wrong time zone |
| 5 hours 30 minutes | A camera on UTC in India |
| Exactly one hour | Daylight saving time not changed |
| Years out | The clock was never set |
The shift works in days, hours and minutes, so all of these are one step. The tool moves every photo by the same amount, which keeps the gaps between photos true. It does not set every photo to one fixed date.
A few details
- JPEG only. Date shifting works on JPEG files. HEIC from iPhones is not supported yet, and PNG and WebP rarely carry a camera date.
- Location is kept. Changing dates leaves everything else alone. To remove location as well, see what EXIF data reveals.
- Prevent it next time. Set the camera’s clock from your phone at the start of a trip or event. Some cameras can sync the time through their phone app.
For a single camera on the wrong time zone, the guide to fixing the wrong date on photos walks through that case in detail.
- Photos
