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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.
Hello Chad,
While the issue you described seems more related to OneDrive rather than Windows Photo Gallery, let me see if I could be of help. In Windows Explorer, right click on one of your photo files and select Properties in the context menu. In the File Properties dialog, click on the Details tab. Does the Date Taken attribute has a value on it? If so, is it the expected value?
There is no Date Taken, only Date Created and Date Modified which have been changed to the date that I uploaded the pictures.
I have one image that originally showed a Date Modified of 12-27-2016. This was the only data that kept it organized by date. When I uploaded the image, OneDrive changed the Date Modified to the day I uploaded it, 5-13-2018. Now, this image will not be organized properly by when it was taken. This hurts very bad.
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?
J Oliver, thank you for your response and I appreciate that you understand this issue. Looking at my photos (most taken from iPhones over the years), the Date Taken field is blank. The only fields that the iPhone appears to have filled out was the Date Created and Date Modified fields. The Date Created and Date Modified fields were the fields that OneDrive arbitrarily reset to the current date upon upload.
Why is that many pictures uploaded to OneDrive untouched, while several it modified those fields? I've never seen a cloud service do this, and I've tried several.
The pictures were taken directly from my iPhones, many different models, over the years and stored in dated folders on Winodows Explorer.
