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.

0 comments

93 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2020-01-04T06:50:17+00:00

    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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2019-10-17T23:46:15+00:00

    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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2019-10-16T13:49:02+00:00

    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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2019-10-16T13:01:19+00:00

    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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2019-09-24T13:27:51+00:00

    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?

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments