OneDrive changing the dates on my photos?!?!?

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.

This really needs to be fixed... here here

Quite amazing to see the obfuscation and confusion going on in tech replies around this major problem. It is not about the 'date taken' metadata in the photo files. Most people are using, for all files where date matters, the simple file created/last modified data that is apparent on any file manager. Onedrive appears to alter that simply by the act of uploading the file to the cloud, ie. if you upload ten files today they will all have today's date and time of uploading.

If you are trying to use onedrive as an archive, or to mirror between computers for instance, it will not work for you. For example, if you just want to see the most recent files, as you deliberately modified or created them, you will not be able to if they have gone to Onedrive.

The original dates will probably still be there in the metadata if you open the file, eg. if I open a pdf, showing in file explorer properties the date it went to Onedrive,  it will still have the real date created and real last modified inside it when I open properties in the pdf reader. However, this is clearly impractical if I am trying to quickly sort or access multiple files. I would have to open each one in turn and go through that process of opening and inspecting properties to find their chronological order.

In short because Onedrive works this way it really is only useful as a replacement for your computer or network hard drive.  If date matters, then you must always work on Onedrive, so it is the true representation of when a file was last worked on. In the case of photos you will need to upload as soon as possible from when you take them, that way they will show an approximate date. This is of course an absurd situation.

Can see how this approach makes business sense for Microsoft but for anyone who wants to not be held hostage, the message is stay away. While in its current state, do not use Onedrive for back-up if dates matter. Given the tech replies there is obviously no fix available. Dropbox or perhaps icloud will be a better solution for people who want to back-up and archive.

I  am having the same problem. I use AlwaySync as my backup/synchronizer application. OneDrive is changing the Date Created to the moment it was uploaded. The date taken and date modified seem to be left alone. AlwaySync apparently uses the date created and it thinks the files in OneDrive are newer.

To me it does not make sense for OneDrive to change the date created to the date/time when it was uploaded.

J Oliver,

Very interesting!  So deleting/restarting picture metadata must be an unintended consequence of using Files On Demand!  This tells me that everyone should turn that feature off, or Microsoft should disable the feature, until this issue can be fixed.  I’m telling you, as you would agree, there will be alot of ticked people when they realize their priceless photos from 2005 have been redated to 2018!

Do you have plans to report this issue up to engineering or whoever can take next steps in the OneDrive department??

Thanks again for figuring this out!!!

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?