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
    2020-01-06T01:35:50+00:00

    One more thing... If you click Details on a photo in OneDrive, it will show you the Date Taken value. If there is none, it won't show that value. 

    With:

    Without:

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-01-04T00:46:59+00:00

    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?

    **** Microsoft! I've performed a multitude of testing uploading and downloading image files to/from One Drive using various transport methods, all ending with the same result as Chad stated above. Onedrive does NOT, let me repeat, does NOT maintain file integrity. Why don't you people admit you guys screwed up and are diligently working on a fix rather than publishing **** to your clients (end users) and not addressing the root cause? If you can't, go back to selling used cars. I've had it with your ****!

    Again, just last night, January 2, 2020, I uploaded 300 image files with ALL dates documented prior to uploading: 

    EXIF Date Taken

    EXIF Date Created

    EXIF Date Modified

    Date Taken

    Date Created

    Date Modified

    Date Last Saved

    The ONLY date that was preserved was the date within the filename itself. The Date Taken was deleted completely on all files. Every single remaining Date field was changed to the date and time the files were uploaded to Onedrive. So quit giving your clients a bunch of ****. If you don't know, DON'T GUESS! If several users are having the same issue, it would only seem appropriate for you to go test the scenario PRIOR to opening your mouth here acting like you know it all and the people have posted there issues here don't know diddly squat.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-01-26T05:43:34+00:00

    OneDrive arbitrarily sets the 'Date Taken' time stamp upon upload to 1/1/70 5:00AM on many of my photos, most of which were taken within the last 10 years.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-01-16T07:12:27+00:00

    and they no this and no one cares.  very sad.

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-12-16T14:56:21+00:00

    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.

    For as long as Windows has been around, and back in DOS before that, Date Created has been the date the file was created on that drive. If you set up a new computer, and copy the files from another computer over a network, they will all have Date Created value of the date they where created/added to the new drive.

    The Date Modified field will not change in these scenarios. Date Modified SHOULD only change if the user has chosen to change the file. It does appear that Microsoft is making changes to files and then updating the Date Modified field to reflect the date of these changes. 

    I understand the frustration and desire for these fields to work differently, and agree that MS should not be changing user files (which updates the Date Modified value ) without user consent. However, I would also say that there is a specific field intended to protect against this exact problem: Date Taken. This is the ONLY field that people should be using to store the date a photo was taken. This seems obvious -- what if you crop a photo or remove red-eye or need to rotate and then you save the updated photo? Obviously, the file date fields will reflect the date you saved the changed the photo. But the Date Taken field will still correctly hold the date the picture was taken.

    I came here looking for a solution to a related problem, because I also see that Date Taken field has been wiped out on a small % of my photos, all taken with a specific third-party camera app (ProShot on Windows Phone), while they do show the Date Taken correctly on the phone, so somewhere in the transfer the value appears to have been stripped. However most photos even from that app do correctly have a Date Taken value. Fortunately, the number missing Date Taken is only about 1%, nowhere near the 10%-20% the original poster described for changes to the Date Modified field.

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