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

Anonymous
2018-05-14T02:11:34+00:00

Hello,

I recently uploaded 45,000 of our family photos to OneDrive, the dates ranging from 1999 to 2018.  They had been previously separated in folders by year and month, so decided it was time to back them up in the cloud and take advantage of Microsoft's photo features through OneDrive.  After uploading all of my photos, I was shocked to see that many of my photos were reorganized.  Randomly, photos from 2002, 2005, 2009, 2014, and 2016 were shown as brand new photos with a current date stamp.  I found that there were literally hundreds of photos that were RE-DATED to the the date that I uploaded the photos.  Somehow, OneDrive physically changed the metadata on the Date Modified and Date Taken to reflect the date that I uploaded the photos, not the date that they were originally taken.  Even worse, the uploaded picture permanently changed the date on my local pictures, so now these photos are irreversibly corrupted and I cannot organize them by date anymore.

Microsoft, this is a massively humongous bug in the OneDrive system that I found, by searching, has been questioned several times before.  Whenever I look at those posts, the commenting has been locked so that nobody can comment anymore.  Not sure why Microsoft wants this issue hushed by the community, but this problem will not just go away.  It needs to be fixed as soon as possible!!  We have thousands of photos that are unknowingly being corrupted, most people probably just haven't figured it out yet.

One potential solution to this problem would be to turn off whatever mechanism is redating photos/videos, or changing metadata.  If anyone else is having this issue, please comment below.  Microsoft, is there anything being done to fix this bug???

Thank you, and I respectfully appreciate your attention to this matter.  OneDrive is a great service and I really hope to continue using it.  This is just too big not to make top priority in resolving.

Windows for home | Other | Music, photos, and video

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-03-12T20:25:18+00:00

    Unhelpful and irrelevant comment wcni

    Either date created needa to be untouched or date taken value needs to be editable so that photos can be arranged properly.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-03-12T20:06:22+00:00

    Everyone seems to be missing the point.

    The 'Date Created' for an image file (i.e. the date it was taken) is held in the files' metadata.

    The 'Date Created' for any file on a PC is the date the file was created.

    Rest assured that Onedrive etc is not changing the metadata in the file it just screwing with your heads regarding file ncreation dates.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-02-03T04:02:02+00:00

    Thanks.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-02-01T12:24:27+00:00

    I am not a huge expert on this, having just uploaded my camera roll from my phone to OneDrive, around 600 photos.   They all contained both date taken and - equally important for those pictures of bluebells where you don't remember exactly where you were

    • GPS information.

    If I go to my OneDrive folder on my p/c, this information is not there.   But it isn't lost - in the file that is sitting on OneDrive's servers, all the metadata is still there and is uncorrupted - camera used, f stop, exposure, GPS etc etc.     

    As explained elsewhere, what is visible on your computer in File Manager is just a stripped-down placeholder - if you double click the image, it gets downloaded from the cloud to your p/c and the metadata becomes visible again.

    It would be REALLY helpful if OneDrive could consider GPS and Date Taken as critical information which should also be visible in the placeholder version on your p/c, but in my brief experience, the transfer process is not guilty of changing the data.

    That's a great point. It's not my problem -- I have my OneDrive set to full sync and download everything to my PC, but for some others who are using the placeholders/Sync on Demand, that could explain why they're not seeing them.

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-01-31T17:56:51+00:00

    I am not a huge expert on this, having just uploaded my camera roll from my phone to OneDrive, around 600 photos.   They all contained both date taken and - equally important for those pictures of bluebells where you don't remember exactly where you were

    • GPS information.

    If I go to my OneDrive folder on my p/c, this information is not there.   But it isn't lost - in the file that is sitting on OneDrive's servers, all the metadata is still there and is uncorrupted - camera used, f stop, exposure, GPS etc etc.     

    As explained elsewhere, what is visible on your computer in File Manager is just a stripped-down placeholder - if you double click the image, it gets downloaded from the cloud to your p/c and the metadata becomes visible again.

    It would be REALLY helpful if OneDrive could consider GPS and Date Taken as critical information which should also be visible in the placeholder version on your p/c, but in my brief experience, the transfer process is not guilty of changing the data.

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