Date stamp, Exiftool and Google Photos

Processing
1

I have been trying to fix the dates in my mobile photos because after moving everything from my old phone I had a bunch of pics from whatsapp archives etc stored on my computer, and these photos appear on Google Photos (both the web app and the mobile app on my new phone) with the capture dates all wrong. Luckily the filenames have the correct date so I’ve used the following command to fix the tags:

$ exiftool -s "-alldates<filename" "-filemodifydate<filename" "-filecreatedate<filename"  IMG_*.jpg

What I’m doing is to copy the date contained in the filenames (e.g., IMG_20170210_171030.jpg is an image captured on the 10th of February, 2017, at 17:10:30) to the three main exif tags DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate and ModifyDate – shortened as alldates – as well as the actual file modification and creation dates (FileModifyDate and FileCreateDate).

This works, no problem, but when I sync back the files to Google Photos / Drive, the photos are not shown as updated on the web app or the mobile app. So where does Google Photos take the photo creation date from? Which tag or what other information in the file?

2

DateTimeOriginal is the standard place to look.
https://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags/privateifd/exif/datetimeoriginal.html

1 Like
3

And in fact I do update DateTimeOriginal but still it does not seem to be recognized by Google Photos…

4

Try
exiftool -a -G1 -s FILE
And see if there are any other tags carrying the wrong dates. Also make sure you delete them from Google Photos before uploading again

1 Like
5

@aadm Are you saying that DateTimeOriginal has the wrong date? Typically, I would use this info to overwrite the other tags and to name the files… (If the tag is wrong, I would shift it first and then use it to change everything else. Wait, I forget if it is even changeable; some apps might not allow it as a safety measure.)

6

Thanks @Andrius for the tip, I will check it out and report.

@afre yes, DateTimeOriginal was set to the wrong data for I don’t know what mysterious reason while I was backing up my old phone and trasnferring the files to the new one.