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
    2018-05-18T18:28:50+00:00

    I think this is what happened to my photo files as well when using OneDrive Files On Demand.

    Now I have a large number of photos dated incorrectly.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-05-18T19:00:31+00:00

    If you disable the File On-Demand feature it is my understanding that the entire files should sync back to your machine, thus restoring the original metadata. Not sure of the Date Created and Modified values.

    Hope this helps

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-07-24T20:13:53+00:00

    Interesting, but not really a solution.

    This fault has been reported to Microsoft on several occassions, and seemingly ignored.

    Quite francly this is the first time anyone has provided a plausible cause what I have seen in different forum threads.

    What needs being done is to fix the issue, I mean who really wants all files and photos redated even if it is by the "on demand" feature.

    At least a means to manually correct the metavalues for date taken should be availble for photos.

    I don't have as many photos as Chad but quite a few have faulty dates.

    If onedrive really wants to be a contender for backuping/storing photos users need to be able to sort corecctly and be able to trust that sorting.

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-07-24T21:32:39+00:00

    The date created and date modified values are file system attributes, not values which are part of the file per se. Not just onedrive modify these values, these values are susceptible to change even when simply copying the files to another media or uploading them to a server.

    In my opinion, the best solution is to have the date created value stored within the file to the proper metadata fields. This can be done using various photo management tools.

    Personally I use the command line driven Exiftool. There are various ways to edit the date taken using it. I would recommend checking the documentation and crafting a command that copies the "Date Created" value in cases in which if the file's "Date Taken" metadata field is empty.

    Hope this helps,

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