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
    2018-05-16T14:38:10+00:00

    J Oliver,

    Very interesting!  So deleting/restarting picture metadata must be an unintended consequence of using Files On Demand!  This tells me that everyone should turn that feature off, or Microsoft should disable the feature, until this issue can be fixed.  I’m telling you, as you would agree, there will be alot of ticked people when they realize their priceless photos from 2005 have been redated to 2018!

    Do you have plans to report this issue up to engineering or whoever can take next steps in the OneDrive department??

    Thanks again for figuring this out!!!

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-05-16T14:16:30+00:00

    I did a test on my machine and noticed that the metadata was missing, so OneDrive may turned out to be the culprit!

    I really do not use this feature given that my PC has adequate storage for my large photo collection, but what it does it uploads the original files to OneDrive, and leaves a placeholder on your PC. Pretty nifty feature for Windows machines with limited storage.

    Apps such as Windows Photo Gallery and Photos sort photos based on the dates they can find from the image files. If you look at the table on this post, you will note the "reading" order WPG uses for dates. If there is no date value within the metadata, WPG turns to the date time created value, thus explaining any irregular sorting issues.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-05-16T14:05:56+00:00

    J Oliver,

    I do have Files On Demand enabled.  Do you think that might be the problem?

    Thanks for digging into this!

    Chad

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-05-16T00:38:30+00:00

    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.

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-05-15T14:39:31+00:00

    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.

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