Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Every new account starts with free photo credits, no credit card required. Upload a few scanned photos and see them dated, with the handwriting read. Then, if you like, tag the people you know and we'll sharpen the dates with a second pass, included. When you're ready for more, buy a plan and we'll date more of your photos.

Uploading is free. A photo only counts against your plan when we date it. One photo dated uses one photo from your plan, and a front and back pair counts as one photo. Photos you mark as copies of each other also count as one: we date one and every copy gets the same date, free. Photos beyond your plan wait in your archive for 30 days, then are removed if you don't buy more.

When you scan old photos and import them to Google Photos or Apple Photos, they all show up on the scan date, not when they were taken. Timeline Scan fixes this. Upload your scans and we estimate the original date for each photo using handwriting on the back, filenames, timestamps, nearby photos, and the clues in the picture itself. Import the corrected files and they land in the right year.

Yes, locally, in Lehi, Utah. If your photos are still prints in boxes or albums, drop them off by appointment and we scan the front and back of every photo, date them, and organize them. Nothing is ever mailed. Prices are on the photo scanning page.

Not near Utah? Have any scanning service digitize your prints (or scan them yourself with FrontBack Scanner, our free Mac app), then upload the files here and we'll date and organize them the same way.

Yes, that’s what Timeline Scan does. We use an AI vision model to estimate when each scanned photo was originally taken from clues in the image (clothing, hairstyles, vehicles, film grain, print borders), read any handwriting or date stamps on the back, and parse dates from the filename or folder when present.

The combined estimate is written directly into the EXIF DateTimeOriginal field, so Google Photos, Apple Photos, Immich, and any other library show the photo in the correct year. In our ground-truth benchmarks on real family archives (prints spanning 1986–2005), the relative chronological order between any two photos is correct 97.7% to 99.2% of the time; bare prints with no printed dates or backs at all are harder, and we publish those numbers too (how we measure accuracy).

Immich reads EXIF:DateTimeOriginal and falls back to file modification time when that field is empty, which is why all your scans show today’s date. Three options:

1. Edit dates inside Immich (multi-select → Edit date and time). Lives only in Immich’s database.
2. Bulk-set folder dates with ExifTool: exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1989:07:15 12:00:00" /path/to/album/. Coarse but free.
3. Run scans through Timeline Scan, which estimates a per-photo date and writes it to EXIF before you import. After import (or for already-imported photos), trigger Administration → Jobs → Refresh exif info so Immich picks up the new metadata.

Option 3 is preferred for archives larger than ~50 photos because the dates live inside the file and survive any future Immich migration.

If your scanned photos already have dates in their filenames (e.g. IMG_19890505_001.jpg), use ExifTool. It’s free and one command does the job:

exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal<filename" -d "%Y%m%d" /path/to/photos

ExifTool walks the folder, parses the date pattern out of each filename, and writes it into EXIF DateTimeOriginal.

What ExifTool can’t do is generate a date when the filename has no date hint (Scan_001.jpg, FastFoto_0001.jpg), the common case for scanned photos. For those, Timeline Scan estimates the date from the photo itself (handwriting, era clues, neighboring scans) and writes the EXIF tag for you.

They solve different parts of the same problem and work well together.

• ExifTool is a free command-line tool that reads and writes photo metadata. It can copy a date from a filename into EXIF, bulk-set every photo in a folder to a single date, or shift dates by an offset. It cannot look at a photo and decide what year it was taken.
• Timeline Scan is an AI service that estimates the original date of each scanned photo from visual clues, handwriting on the back, and any filename/folder hints, then writes the result into EXIF. The output is a folder of corrected files ready for any photo library.

Use ExifTool when your filenames already contain dates. Use Timeline Scan for the much larger pile of scans whose filenames have no date hint, where AI vision is the only way to get a per-photo estimate.

Yes. Instead of all bunching on the day you scanned them, your photos spread across your library in roughly the right order. In our ground-truth benchmarks on real family archives (prints spanning 1986–2005), the AI places any two photos in the correct chronological order 97.7% to 99.2% of the time (how we measure accuracy).

The AI examines clothing, hairstyles, vehicles, decor, film type, and print borders to place the photo in an era. It also reads the back: handwritten dates, names, and notes are used as direct evidence and saved as the photo's description. The goal is the right year, not the exact day.

Yes. Incorrect orientation photos from scanning don't always come out upright, so Timeline Scan checks every photo and rotates it right-side up automatically. A purpose-built AI model (EfficientNetV2) detects orientation with 98.8% accuracy; when it isn't confident, it leaves the photo unchanged rather than risk rotating it the wrong way.

Any library that reads standard EXIF and IPTC metadata: Google Photos, Apple Photos, Amazon Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, Immich, Flickr, and most others.

One note for Google Photos: since early 2022, embedded captions appear under the “Other” section of the info panel rather than under “Description.” The text is still fully searchable and round-trips correctly on download. Apple Photos and Immich display it normally. See the Google Photos export page for an annotated look at exactly where everything shows up.

Yes. After dating finishes, connect your Google account and we add the archive to your library in date order. You can have us create a named album too. No ZIP to download, no second upload.

We only request the photoslibrary.appendonly scope, which lets us add photos and nothing else. We cannot read, modify, or delete anything in your existing library. The integration is optional. Disconnect any time from your dashboard or Google account and we delete the token immediately. Full details, including exactly what transfers and what Google can't accept, on the Google Photos export page.

You choose at download time, with a live preview of your own files. Four layouts:

• Just as you uploaded them (the default): your folders, your file names.
• One folder, oldest to newest: renamed image_0001.jpg, image_0002.jpg, … so name order is date order.
• In folders by year: 1974, 1975, … optionally with month folders inside.
• In folders by person: one folder per person you named; a photo of two people is placed in both.

The corrected dates and notes are written inside every file regardless of layout, and you can re-download the same archive in a different layout any time. Examples of each tree are on the file download page.

Connect your self-hosted Immich and pick the photos you want dated. Timeline Scan can even surface your undated scans for you. We pull them in, run the same dating and handwriting pipeline as any upload, then write the results straight back onto those assets.

Four things get updated: the capture date, any handwriting from the back of the photo (as the description), orientation, and the people you tagged. Only the catalogue metadata changes. Your original image files are never modified or re-uploaded.

You'll need two things to connect: your Immich reachable at a public URL, and an API key (create one under Account Settings, then API Keys). Grant the key these permissions: user (read), asset (read, view, update, edit.create), album (read), person (read, create, update), and face (read, create). Add asset.upload too if you'd like us to automatically re-locate photos that move in your library; it only runs a checksum check and never uploads files.

Full details on the Immich integration page.

Yes, that's what the Timeline Scan iPhone app is for. It scans your Apple Photos library on the device, finds the photos stuck on the day they were scanned instead of the day they were taken, and gathers them into one list. Screenshots, WhatsApp saves, and GIFs are sorted into their own buckets so they stay out of the way.

For the photos you pick, the app sends a small preview for dating (never the full-size original) then writes the corrected date back onto the same photo in place: both the date Photos sorts by and the date inside the file. Pixels are never re-encoded, and a photo that changed while we worked is skipped rather than guessed.

See it in three taps on the iPhone app page, or read exactly what gets written on the Apple Photos page. The app is a free download on the App Store.

We only update the date and description information stored in the photo's metadata, not the image itself. Your photo's picture quality, resolution, and content remain completely untouched. Think of it like reading the note on the back of a printed photo and filing it in the right spot in your album. The picture doesn't change. You're just organizing it properly.

Yes. Photos are encrypted and processed on enterprise-grade servers. We never use them for training and delete them when processing is done. We don't sell or share them.

JPEG and TIFF. These are the most common scanner outputs and have reliable EXIF support across all major libraries. If your scanner produces PNG or WEBP, most scanning software can save as JPEG instead. Choose TIFF if you want lossless quality.

That's perfectly fine. Many old photos have blank backs. Our AI will still analyze the front of the image to determine the date. The handwriting reading is a bonus.

Just scan the front and back of each photo one after the other, so they stay in order. For example: photo1-front, photo1-back, photo2-front, photo2-back, and so on. Most scanners will name the files sequentially, which keeps them paired automatically. We'll match them up from there. Simply tell us your naming convention and we'll automatically pair them up for you. Multiple naming conventions can be listed.

For scanner settings, file format, and naming recommendations, see our Scanning Best Practices guide.

The AI typically gets the right decade and often narrows it to within a few years. A 1982 photo might land at 1980 or 1983. Accuracy improves when you:

• Scan the backs. Handwritten dates and faint timestamps are often the strongest signal.
• Keep related photos in order. Neighboring filenames help when photos came from the same album or event.
• Use meaningful names. Folder and file names like Jul89Sept90_0001.jpg anchor photos with few visual clues.
• Tag the people you know. After your first results, add names and birth years and we'll re-date with that context: age can rule out years that don't fit.

You can always adjust any photo's date manually after importing.

Most orders are processed within 24 to 48 hours. Larger collections (5,000+ photos) may take a bit longer. We'll email you when your photos are processed and ready to download.

There's a concrete refund policy. Credits are one-time purchases (no subscription), and a credit is only consumed when we actually date a photo. Within 7 days of purchase, any credits you haven't used are refunded prorated: (unused credits ÷ credits purchased) × amount paid, including the sales tax on the unused portion. Credits already consumed by dating aren't refundable, because the AI processing cost is spent the moment a photo is dated.

If the service materially fails (for example, dates are systematically wrong for reasons unrelated to your source images), email support@timelinescan.com and we'll make it right regardless of the 7-day window. Refund requests are answered within 3 business days. Full details are in the Terms of Service.

Email support@timelinescan.com and a real person (usually Spencer, the founder) will get back to you, typically within one business day. For the local photo scanning service in Lehi, Utah, call or text 801-753-8328. You can also send a message from the contact page.