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

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.

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-02-03T04:02:02+00:00

    Thanks.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-03-12T20:06:22+00:00

    Everyone seems to be missing the point.

    The 'Date Created' for an image file (i.e. the date it was taken) is held in the files' metadata.

    The 'Date Created' for any file on a PC is the date the file was created.

    Rest assured that Onedrive etc is not changing the metadata in the file it just screwing with your heads regarding file ncreation dates.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-03-12T20:25:18+00:00

    Unhelpful and irrelevant comment wcni

    Either date created needa to be untouched or date taken value needs to be editable so that photos can be arranged properly.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-03-12T22:40:10+00:00

    Unhelpful and irrelevant comment wcni

    Either date created needa to be untouched or date taken value needs to be editable so that photos can be arranged properly.

    Lucky_Blues, I think what wcni meant was, "The 'Date taken' for an image file (i.e., the date it was taken) is held in the files' metadata." (replaced 'Date Created' with 'Date Taken'). OneDrive may change the "Date Created" value, because that's the date the file is created on the current volume and has nothing to do with when the file came into existence. The "Date Taken" is an editable field set by your camera (so camera needs to support it) that should be the timestamp on the picture when it was actually taken.

    To your demand -- yes, you can edit Date Taken:

    1. Right click on the file in Explorer, whether it's on your local drive or a placeholder to the file in the cloud on OneDrive.
    2. Select Properties
    3. Go to the Details tab
    4. In the "Origin" group, you will see "Date taken" you can change this if you want

    That's it. Piece of cake!

    Cheers

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-03-13T03:59:05+00:00

    I'm more inclined to believe wcni is spoofing the thread but... your solution though attempting at helpful is contraproductive.

    I've added the files to onedrive and onedrive is supposed to be my drive just online so as long as what you're suggesting doesn't work online it's not a real solution. 

    The fact that not all photos get a date taken is of course another issue, and I have raised that to the current phone-developer. Since that also is seemingly random.

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