Apple Photos · iPhone App

Your iPhone Library, Dated in Place

The Timeline Scan app finds the scanned photos stuck on the day they were digitized, dates them, and fixes each one right in your Apple Photos library. No exporting, no re-importing, no duplicates.

Get the iPhone App See What's Written Back
Runs on your iPhone Dates fixed in place Originals never leave your phone

Both directions, carefully

Small Previews Out, Real Dates Back

The app reads your library's dates right on the phone. For the photos you choose, it sends only a small preview copy for dating — your full-size originals never leave your iPhone.

No hunting required

Your Undated Scans, Found on Your Phone

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Scanned photos rarely know when they were taken. They carry the day they were digitized, so a print from 1987 files itself under 2019, buried between last week's screenshots. The app combs your library right on the device and gathers those stuck photos into one list — picking what to date takes a minute, not an afternoon. (New to the problem? Read the full guide to fixing scanned photo dates.)

On-device scan 8,942 photos checked · 214 stuck on their scan date
  • IMG_2214.JPG Mar 12, 2019 the day it was scanned
  • scan_0034.jpg Mar 12, 2019 same scanning session
  • attic_box_two_08.jpg Jan 4, 2021 another batch
  • … and 211 more, gathered into one list
Scans · 214 Screenshots · 1,038 WhatsApp saves · 96 GIFs · 41 App saves · 312

Screenshots, WhatsApp saves, and GIFs get sorted into their own buckets — nothing is dated unless you opt it in. The scan runs on your phone, and it's free before you even create an account.

The manifest

What Gets Written Back

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Two dates, written onto the exact photos you picked — and a longer list of things we will never touch.

Updated on each photo

The date Photos sorts by

The photo's timeline date is set to the real day, so a print from 1987 jumps from 2019 back where it belongs — in the library grid, in search, in Memories.

The date inside the file

The corrected date is also written into the photo file itself (EXIF), without recompressing a single pixel. It travels with the photo through shares, exports, and backups.

Never touched

Your full-size originals

Never uploaded. Only a small preview of each photo you pick leaves the phone, just long enough to be dated.

Your pixels

The image is never re-encoded, resized, or replaced. Same photo, same quality — only the date fields change.

Photos that changed mid-flight

Edited or deleted something while we were dating it? We notice and skip it rather than guess.

After the fix

What You'll See in Photos

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Open a fixed photo in the Photos app and swipe up. Point at a number to see where it lands.

  • The corrected date

    The photo now sits in its real year. No more opening “Adjust Date & Time” two hundred times by hand.

  • The date inside the file

    Written into the photo itself, so the date survives sharing, exporting, and any backup that leaves iCloud.

  • Same file, same quality

    Your photo is never re-encoded or replaced. The pixels are untouched — only the date fields changed.

  • Everywhere Photos shows a date

    The header above the photo, the library grid, widgets, and Memories all pick up the new date instantly.

Illustrative recreation of the Photos info panel on iPhone, using a sample generated family photo.

About the people in them

Face Tagging, the Honest Version

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Apple lets no app read or write the People album — so we can't import the names Photos already knows, and we can't push names back into it. What we can do: flip on “Also tag people” and we run our own face recognition on the previews. Name each person once, and those names sharpen the dating — a face with a birth year anchors a whole batch of photos. The names come back in your Timeline Scan archive and inside every file download; they just can't be written into Apple's People album.

Good to know

What You'll Need

An iPhone

Running iOS 17 or newer. The library scan, the count, and the price estimate are all free — before you even create an account.

The Timeline Scan app

Free on the App Store. You only pay for the photos you choose to date, same pricing as the web.

Photos permission

The app asks for library access to run the scan. Everything stays on your phone until you pick the photos to send for dating.

More ways to get your photos back

File download Four folder layouts, your files forever Google Photos One-click album export, in date order Immich Self-hosted write-back, dated in place

Fix Your Library Right on Your Phone

Start with free photos, no credit card required. The library scan itself costs nothing.

Get the iPhone App

Apple, iPhone, and Apple Photos are trademarks of Apple Inc. The interface above is an illustrative recreation, not a screenshot. Timeline Scan is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple.

Coming with the iPhone app

Fix Scanned Photo Dates in Apple Photos, Right on Your iPhone

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We're finishing a Timeline Scan app for iPhone that finds the scanned photos stuck on the wrong date in your Apple Photos library, dates them with AI, and writes the corrected date back onto each photo in place — both the date Photos sorts by and the date inside the file. Small previews go out, corrected dates come back, and your full-size originals never leave your phone.

Until it ships, Timeline Scan already works well with Apple Photos: upload your scans, and the file download writes every corrected date inside the files themselves — in the fields Apple reads — so Photos puts them in the right order the moment you import. For why scans land on the wrong date in the first place, see the guide to fixing scanned photo dates.

See the File Download