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

You've got to be kidding, right?  I think you left out the step where you pat your head and rub your stomach, while holding down the Alt key (or is it the ctrl key?).

SOLUTION IS ON PAGE 6 AT THE BOTTOM.

!!!!!!!!!!    HERE IS A SOLUTION GUYS       !!!!!!!!

January 3, 2020

The same **** happened to me last night and it really pissed me off, so I've been testing different methods, etc to find a work-around but......    It seems it was there, built-in all the time. However they must have kept it a secret to the support people who are supposed to furnish answers and solutions instead of projecting a laissez-faire attitude toward us, their clients.  C'est la vie.....

STEPS TO DOWNLOAD IMAGE FILES FROM GOOGLE PHOTOS

AND

RETAIN DATE, DATE TAKEN, AND DATE CREATED FIELDS

1)      Go to photos.google.com 

2)    Click on selection or all photos with dot in upper left-hand corner of image

3)      Click on hamburger

4)      Click on Edit Date & Time

5)      Choose Shift dates & times (Photos keep their relative time difference)

6)   The Date and Time fields will default to value of image file with earliest (or oldest depending on your perspective) entries.

7)     Click on Preview to view Dates and Times of files

8)      Click Save. The dot indicating the selected file(s) will now disappear.

9)  Re-select those files you wish to download as in #2 above

10)  Click on hamburger and choose Download. Files will be zipped and downloaded to your computer with the Date, Date Taken, &         Date Created fields left unscathed including these three Date fields in the EXIF Metadata. Also the Date Taken field in the EXIF            metadata will remain as it was and will not be stripped. 

NOTE: Image files downloaded from Google Drive (as opposed to Google Photos) will download without any extra hoops & ladders and will retain all original Date field values.

Yes, this is a royal pain in the **** and requires MUCH more that it really should, but it wouldn’t be Google if it wasn’t this way. They are allergic to documentation and on-going education of their support people and thrive on keeping things moot to make them feel better and keep us bourgeois folks in their proper place.

Aloha,

Forrest

Date Created and Date Modified are file attributes which can be easily modified by OS or application operations. For example, copying a file to another server, say by FTP, may change those two values.

Date Taken, on the other hand, is a value which is stored within the file as embedded metadata and "travels" with it. Unfortunately, some web services will "strip" this information on transfer.

To the best of my knowledge and experience with OneDrive, it maintains file integrity and does not arbitrarily change the Date Taken value.

Were the files downloaded from a site or transferred directly to the PC from a camera or smartphone?

**** Microsoft! I've performed a multitude of testing uploading and downloading image files to/from One Drive using various transport methods, all ending with the same result as Chad stated above. Onedrive does NOT, let me repeat, does NOT maintain file integrity. Why don't you people admit you guys screwed up and are diligently working on a fix rather than publishing **** to your clients (end users) and not addressing the root cause? If you can't, go back to selling used cars. I've had it with your ****!

Again, just last night, January 2, 2020, I uploaded 300 image files with ALL dates documented prior to uploading: 

EXIF Date Taken

EXIF Date Created

EXIF Date Modified

Date Taken

Date Created

Date Modified

Date Last Saved

The ONLY date that was preserved was the date within the filename itself. The Date Taken was deleted completely on all files. Every single remaining Date field was changed to the date and time the files were uploaded to Onedrive. So quit giving your clients a bunch of ****. If you don't know, DON'T GUESS! If several users are having the same issue, it would only seem appropriate for you to go test the scenario PRIOR to opening your mouth here acting like you know it all and the people have posted there issues here don't know diddly squat.

I have an old post in this thread, but I thought I would restate what I had discovered... Date Taken does not change. OneDrive will update the file's creation date, which is arguably correct, but not really desired if you want to sort by that. 

Now, here is the bug... In the Photos section of OneDrive, I have seen it sort by that creation date. So when I upload an old photo, it looks new since it appears under the current day.

Maybe that is why many people think the Date Taken has changed. You have to check the actual metadata. 

I don't know if that still happens, but that is what I had seen.

AlexanderHolmström and Kurt Holzman, I have seen photos lose the "Date Taken" field on upload to OneDrive, but at least in my case, I was able to determine that it had nothing to do with OneDrive -- it was the photo application that saved and viewed the files on my phone. This was tough to track down, because it appeared to be OneDrive. My first clue was that it only happened to photos I had opened in one particular application, and not to other photos, even though they were all taken on the same phone camera.

Is it possible it's the same in your cases -- that something else is touching that Date Taken field? This is a field that's typically set and altered only by a camera or photo editing application, or manually through something like Windows Explorer.

Note that OneDrive should NEVER change any of the metadata fields like ISO or F-Stop or Date Taken, only the file storage fields (e.g., Created, Modified). Changing metadata fields would be sort of like changing the text in a Word document -- a real problem. 

So either, this is a very serious bug, or (and I think this is more likely) it's something other than OneDrive that is changing the value of that field.

AlexanderHolmström, your description of simply moving files from one folder to another on the OneDrive web changing the Date Taken would definitely be a bug if that's correct. I have never seen or heard of anything like that (even from other people on this post). That kind of move could change the Created date, if the new folder happened to be on a different drive (like moving it in Windows Explorer), but not the Date Taken field.