The honest map
What Each Delivery Option Keeps
Timeline Scan finds more than dates: handwriting on the backs, who's in each photo, which way is up. Where you send your photos decides how much of that they can accept. Corrected dates travel everywhere; the rest depends on the service, and this page tells you plainly.
Side by side
One Table, No Fine Print
A ✗ is never our choice: it means that service accepts nothing of the kind from any app. The file download always carries the most, because there everything is written inside your own files.
| What we found | File Download your own files | Google Photos album export | Apple Photos iPhone app, fixed in place | Immich self-hosted write-back |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The corrected date | Yes.Written inside every file | Yes.Photos land on the right day | Yes.Fixed right on your photos | Yes.Updated in place |
| Handwriting from the backs | Yes.Saved as each photo's description | Yes.In the file; shows under “Other” | No.Apple lets no app write notes | Yes.Becomes the photo's description |
| People's names (tagged faces) | Yes.Written into each file | No.Google lets no app send names | No.Apple lets no app add people tags | Yes.Real Immich people, faces linked |
| Birthdays you added | No.Photo files have no field for them | No.— | No.— | Yes.Added to each person |
| Photos turned upright | Yes.Upright in every file | Yes.Arrive upright | Yes.Straightened in place | Yes.Via Immich's edit (v2.5+) |
Why the crosses exist: Google Photos gives no app a way to attach names to faces, and Apple Photos gives no app a way to write notes, captions, or people tags onto photos in your library. Those are their rules for everyone, not gaps in Timeline Scan. Nothing is lost either way: everything we read stays in your Timeline Scan archive, and delivering one way doesn't use anything up, so you can use more than one.
One helpful wrinkle: importing a file download into Apple Photos is different from the iPhone app's in-place fix. Photos reads the date, the handwritten note, and the tagged names from inside downloaded files, so if you want notes and names in Apple Photos, download first and import.
You Pick the Destination at the End
Start with free photos, no credit card required. Every archive includes all of these options.
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