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
    2019-01-26T13:51:31+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. 

    That doesn't sound like a OneDrive issue. OneDrive does not touch those metadata fields. It will change the "Date Created," because that's based on the date the file is first added to the new folder (and that can cause problems for people), but not the "Date Taken," which is internal data to the file and beyond the scope of what OneDrive syncing will alter.

    If the Date Taken value is changing, I think the problem lies with either the camera software or something else that's accessing the file after it's loaded.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-01-23T18:17:03+00:00

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

    Don't know if this thread is still active but just so you know, google drive does exactly the same thing.  Especially vexing for photos as it strips out the gps data as well.  The only saving grace for me is that I always use date and time as the default filename on any camera'd device where this is an option.

    I have tons of files of other data types where I would've liked to know when they were created.  this is such a stupid and customer unfriendly protocol that these computing giants have implemented, probably to save a few bits and bytes in storage to pad their bottom line.  Sad that we pay for this disservice!

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-11-05T07:13:51+00:00

    I found a strange behavior in the same subject.

    I just uploaded lots of family pictures and I noticed, in android app the order of pictures broken.

    That's why I started to check the attributes of files and that's what I found:

    In my computer, where the synchronization happend there is a gif file which has the following attributes:

    Modified Time: 2017.04.24

    Created Time: 2017.04.24. 

    (this is the real date)

    On the web interface:

    Date created 11/4/2018 8:23 PM (that is the date, when the synchronization happend)

    In android app:

    Created: 11/4/2018

    Modified: 11/4/2018 

    - 
-

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-09-16T00:13:11+00:00

    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.

    Well, said! I currently backup everything to Google but was 'considering' Microsoft One Drive, so installed the app on phone and uploaded all my photos , also having dates issued to photos that I  saved to phone one day old, being listed to One Drive as 48 yrs old.... Not a good deal , if that was my only copy.

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-05-18T19:00:31+00:00

    If you disable the File On-Demand feature it is my understanding that the entire files should sync back to your machine, thus restoring the original metadata. Not sure of the Date Created and Modified values.

    Hope this helps

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