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
    2020-04-26T08:13:43+00:00

    IF you use the  file manager,/copy utility,  TERACOPY  which works seamlessly with Win !0 file manager,   when you transfer files (copy or move)  ...........  THE DATES WILL NOT CHANGE.

    THAT IS A COMPLETE SOLUTION

    Not a solution.

    You're presenting a workaround as everyone else.

    Using local computer to sort by date taken or using a third party tool is all workarounds.

    Onedrive solutions must be within the onedrive i.e. online.

    Photo-view needs option to sort by date taken at the very least!

    Best would be if both original creation and taken date remained the same... this is a basic flaw for all files imo, original create date should be original create date... otherwise that meta data is superfluos and quite frankly misguiding.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-01-31T17:56:51+00:00

    I am not a huge expert on this, having just uploaded my camera roll from my phone to OneDrive, around 600 photos.   They all contained both date taken and - equally important for those pictures of bluebells where you don't remember exactly where you were

    • GPS information.

    If I go to my OneDrive folder on my p/c, this information is not there.   But it isn't lost - in the file that is sitting on OneDrive's servers, all the metadata is still there and is uncorrupted - camera used, f stop, exposure, GPS etc etc.     

    As explained elsewhere, what is visible on your computer in File Manager is just a stripped-down placeholder - if you double click the image, it gets downloaded from the cloud to your p/c and the metadata becomes visible again.

    It would be REALLY helpful if OneDrive could consider GPS and Date Taken as critical information which should also be visible in the placeholder version on your p/c, but in my brief experience, the transfer process is not guilty of changing the data.

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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. Anonymous
    2018-05-15T03:04:25+00:00

    Good that you had a backup!

    I am backing up my photos and metadata as well. After quite some effort in adding captions, tags and other info, I would hate for such scenario to happen.

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