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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.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I landed here because I have the exact same issue. However to further prove that OneDrive is the culprit (even though this seems clear by now):
I had the correct "Date Taken" in Onedrive, all what I did is moving these pictures (in onedrive on the web) to a new folder and all of a sudden all of the images all has the same Date taken.
Now I no longer have a way to sort or try to filter these pictures.
RyanFynn -
This would be ideal, wouldn't it? I've noticed that sometimes OneDrive correctly retains the 'Date taken' field. Other times, the 'Date taken' field reverts to 1/1/70 @ 5:00AM. Still, at other times, OneDrive changes the given date to 'Created' at a more recent date & time that would approximate the 'Modified' field.
While the first of these scenarios (as well as if you were to modify any of your photos at a later time, be it by cropping, etc, where the changes would be reflected in the 'Modified' field) totally makes sense, I have yet to figure out or understand why OneDrive sometimes will (seemingly) arbitrarily time-stamp the photos with the default 1970 date, or otherwise as I've outlined above. Any thoughts?
Well, the memory on my phone was filling up so I thought, guess it's time I pushed some pictures to the cloud to 'free up space', so started the process to shift 10,000+ pics from phone to cloud (approx 80gb of data).
So today, I think let me go and look at a picture I took last week (it was in a shop of various items with prices I wanted to compare).. Well, I cannot find the frigging picture. I try sort by name, or newest or oldest etc.. What would be super useful was if we could sort our pictures by 'Date Taken' if the metadata is still there. Surely that is not too hard?
This is really doing my head in and is not ideal. Obviously if I had onedrive on my phone 2 years ago, I would not have this issue as the sync would happen daily and photos would be in order. To me using the 'date taken' meta data to sort the photos on my phone is not rocket science?
I have noticed similar response problems with answers to MANY other questions on these forums. The advice given often makes me wonder whether those answering actually understand English or are just trotting out canned, inaccurate responses over and over ad nauseum, much like your continued reference to "Date Taken" which has NOTHING to do with the problem at hand.
How can you say that the DateTaken field is not related to determining when a picture was taken? Of course that's the field you should be using. The Created field is merely intended to tell you when your LOCAL copy was created (which can mean when it was copied down to your computer from the cloud).
I have nothing to do with MS, just a user like you, but frustrating when we take our time to contribute to the community and try to help fellow users, only to be greeted with a complaint that the correct answer is not good, because you don't like how file data has been handled by Windows and DOS for the past ~30 years. If MS changed this to support your preference, it would do far more harm than good, because many, many programs and users rely on the Created field being used the way we expect.
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?).
