Nothing is duplicated
The photos already in your library are the ones that get fixed. No second copy, no new album to merge later.
iPhone App · Apple Photos
Change a Photo's Date on iPhone
To change one photo's date, open it in Photos, swipe up, and tap Adjust Date & Time. Scanned photos are the hard part: they all carry the day you digitized them, and you have to know each real year yourself. The Timeline Scan app finds every scan stuck on its scan date, works out the year each one was taken, and writes that date into Apple Photos and into the file's EXIF DateTimeOriginal.
Free to scan your library
Fixed in place, no duplicates
Originals stay on your phone
The problem, in one picture
Every Scan Lands on the Day You Scanned It
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Today, in Photos
Forty years of family, filed under one afternoon, buried between last week's screenshots.
After Timeline Scan
Each photo gets its own date, so the Photos timeline, Search, and Memories all put it in the right decade.
How it works
Three Taps on Your Phone
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Find the stuck ones
The app checks your library on the phone and gathers the photos with no real capture date. Screenshots and app saves go in their own buckets. This part is free, before any account.
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Upload and date them
You see the batch, what it will cost, and what is left, then tap once. Only small previews go up. Printed lab dates, handwriting on the back, film type, clothing, and the faces you have named all feed each estimate.
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Write them back in place
One tap updates the photos already in your library. Nothing is duplicated, nothing is re-encoded, and nothing is downloaded: the same photo simply carries the right date.
Optional, any time: open a photo to see the year we landed on and the handwriting we read off its back, and change any date yourself. Most people never need to.
Honest comparison
When Apple's Built-In Fix Is Enough
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If you know the date and you have a handful of photos, use the Photos app: it is free and it is right there. It can even do a batch, as long as every photo in that batch belongs on the same day. The difference is who works out the year, and whether each photo can get its own.
| Photos app one photo |
Photos app batch select |
Timeline Scan iPhone app |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | A few photos whose date you already know | A stack of photos that really were taken on one day | A box of scans nobody has dated |
| Who works out the year | You | You | The app, from what is in and on the photo2 |
| Dates per selection | One photo, one date | One date, given to every photo you selected1 | A separate date for every photo |
| 200 scans takes | 200 trips through the date picker | One pass, and all 200 end up on the same day | One review, then one tap |
| Date inside the file | No Photos' own database; export the unmodified original and the old date is still in the file3 | No Same | Yes EXIF DateTimeOriginal is rewritten in place, with no recompression |
| Cost | Free | Free | Free to scan and preview, then pay per photo dated |
Both tools can live together: fix the ones you know by hand, and let the app take the years nobody remembers. Undoing is easy either way, because Photos keeps a Revert for any date it has adjusted.1
Measured, not guessed
How Right Are the Dates?
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97.7–99.2%
of photo pairs land in the correct order on realistic family archives
96–100%
of those photos are dated within one year of the truth
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full-size originals uploaded: only a small preview leaves your phone
Figures come from ground-truth benchmarks on prints spanning 1986 to 2005, and harder photos with no printed date or handwriting are measured separately. The method, the datasets, and the weaker numbers are all published on the accuracy page.
Pixels are never touched
Only date fields change. The image is not resized, re-encoded, or replaced, so quality is exactly what it was.
Your originals stay put
A small preview of each photo you pick is sent for dating. Full-size originals never leave the phone, and photos are never used to train AI models.
You approve every date
Dates are shown with the evidence behind them and stay editable. Photos can also revert any date it has adjusted.
Common questions
iPhone Photo Dates, Answered
How do I change the date on multiple photos on my iPhone?
In the Photos app, tap Select, tap the photos you want, then swipe up and choose Adjust Date & Time. Apple describes this batch path in the iPhone User Guide: “To change the date, time, or location of a batch of photos, tap Select, tap the thumbnails you want to change, then follow the steps above.”
You type in one date, and every photo you selected gets that same date. Perfect for a stack of photos from one birthday party. Useless for a box of scans: a 1958 print and a 1987 print would both be filed under whatever single date you typed, so the only way to get them right by hand is one photo at a time. The Timeline Scan app works out a separate date for each photo instead.
Why are my scanned photos all showing today's date?
A scanner writes the moment of scanning, not the moment of the photograph. Prints made before digital cameras have no capture date in them at all, so Photos falls back to the file's creation date, which is the day you digitized it. That is why a boxful of prints from four different decades all pile up on a single afternoon in your library. The longer explanation lives in the guide to fixing scanned photo dates.
Why are my iPhone photos not in chronological order?
Photos sorts by each photo's capture date. Anything that arrived without one, scans, screenshots, saved messages, downloads, gets the date it landed on your phone instead, so it files itself under this year. Give those photos a real capture date and the timeline sorts itself out, because Photos, Search, and Memories all read the same field.
Does the corrected date get written into the photo file itself?
Yes. Timeline Scan writes the date Apple Photos sorts by and the EXIF DateTimeOriginal inside the file, without re-encoding a single pixel, so the date survives an export, an AirDrop, or a move to another photo library later. An adjustment made by hand in Photos is stored in the Photos database instead, which is why an exported unmodified original can still carry the old scan date.
Do my photos leave my phone?
The library scan runs entirely on the device, before you even make an account. For the photos you pick, a small preview copy is sent for dating; your full-size originals stay on the phone. Photos are never used to train AI models and can be deleted at any time. Details are in the privacy policy.
What does the Timeline Scan iPhone app cost?
Scanning your library and seeing how many photos are stuck costs nothing. New accounts start with free photos, no credit card. After that you buy dates in one-time packs, starting at $12 for 100 photos, with no subscription.
Dating happens on the phone or on the web from the same balance, so a pack bought in the app also covers photos on your computer. Full numbers are on the pricing page.
Not just the phone
Photos Somewhere Else?
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The same dating runs on the web for photos that live on a computer, a hard drive, or another photo library.
Put Your Scans Back in Their Years
Start with free photos, no credit card required. Scanning your library costs nothing.
Get the iPhone AppSources
Where These Facts Come From
- Apple, “See photo and video information on iPhone”, iPhone User Guide: the Adjust Date & Time steps, the batch instruction (tap Select, tap the thumbnails, then follow the single-photo steps), and Revert. The outcome of that batch path, the one date you type landing on every photo in the selection, is what the app does today; Apple documents the steps rather than the result.
- Timeline Scan, dating accuracy methodology: benchmark datasets, ground truth, and the measured ordering and within-one-year figures quoted above.
- Apple Support Community, “Changing EXIF Date in Photos for Mac”: an Adjust Date & Time change is recorded in the Photos database, so an exported unmodified original keeps the file's original date.
Last updated .
Apple, iPhone, and Apple Photos are trademarks of Apple Inc. The iPhone frames show real screenshots of the Timeline Scan app with sample photos. Timeline Scan is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple.