Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Every new account starts with 5 free photos — no credit card required. Upload a few scanned photos, see them dated, handwriting read, and faces tagged. When you're ready for more, purchase a plan to add more photos on top of your free ones.

When you scan old printed photos and add them to a photo library like Google Photos or Apple Photos, the library thinks the photo was taken on the day it was scanned. All your scanned photos end up clumped together at one date, out of place in your timeline.

Timeline Scan fixes this: you upload your scanned photos, and we use all the information given to give a best estimate for the original date of each photo. We take in the handwriting on the back, the filename, timestamps, nearby photos, and detected faces to best estimate the photo's original date. When you import the corrected photos into your library, they appear in the right place in time.

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 testing, the relative chronological order between any two photos is correct between 94% and 99.3% of the time.

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. Timeline Scan automatically arranges your scanned photos into near-accurate chronological order, so when you scroll your library they appear in roughly the right sequence — earlier photos before later ones — instead of all bunched together on the day you scanned them.

Even when the exact date of an individual photo isn't certain, the relative order between photos holds up very well. In our testing, when comparing any two photos, our AI places them in the correct order between 94% and 99.3% of the time. In plain terms: your family timeline reads in the right direction, with the older memories ahead of the newer ones.

Our AI examines many visual clues on the front of each photo: the style of clothing people are wearing, hairstyles, vehicles, home decor, the quality and type of the photograph itself (color vs. black-and-white, film grain, print borders), and other contextual details.

It also reads the back of each photo. Many old photos have handwritten notes like dates, names, locations, or descriptions. Our AI not only reads this handwriting and uses it to improve the date estimate, but also updates the photo's metadata that will appear in your photo library.

While no system can pinpoint the exact day a 20-year-old photo was taken, our AI is very good at determining the approximate year or era. The goal is to get your photos in the right part of your timeline, not mixed in with last week's pictures.

Timeline Scan works with any photo library or app that reads standard photo metadata. This includes:

Google Photos, Apple Photos (iCloud), Amazon Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, Immich, Flickr, and most other photo management apps.

We update the industry-standard EXIF & IPTC date fields, and the ImageDescription, XMP, & IPTC fields for any handwriting we find on the back. Any app that reads these fields will place your photos correctly and display the descriptions.

One quirk specific to Google Photos. In early 2022, Google changed where embedded photo descriptions appear in their info panel. Handwriting captions we write into your photos now show up under the “Other” section of the Google Photos info panel, instead of at the top under “Description”. This affects any tool that writes embedded captions, not just Timeline Scan, and it applies to both JPEG and TIFF — the file format is not the difference. The text is still fully indexed by Google Photos search and round-trips correctly if you ever re-download the file. The top “Description” field in Google Photos is now a separate Google-hosted caption that users type into via the Google Photos UI — Google no longer auto-populates it from embedded metadata. Other libraries like Apple Photos and Immich continue to display the embedded description as the photo’s caption normally.

Yes. After dating finishes you can connect your Google account and Timeline Scan will drop the entire archive into a new album in your Google Photos library — in date order, with the EXIF dates we restored baked in. No ZIP to download, no second upload from your device.

Timeline Scan only requests the photoslibrary.appendonly OAuth scope, which lets us add new photos to a new album we create. Under that scope we cannot read, list, modify, or delete any photos or albums already in your library, including ones we previously created.

The integration is optional and per-archive — you can also stick with the regular ZIP download. Disconnect any time from your dashboard or directly from your Google account; we delete the stored token immediately. See the privacy policy for the full handling details.

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.

Absolutely. Your photos are processed securely and we do not keep copies after processing is complete. We don't sell, share, or use your photos for any other purpose. Your family memories are exactly that — yours. Photos are encrypted and processed by AI on enterprise-grade servers. Your photos are never used for training or for any other purpose. Once the AI has seen and understood where your photo should be in time, the photo data is removed from the server.

We support JPEG and TIFF files. These are the most common formats that scanners produce, and they have the most reliable EXIF metadata support across photo libraries — so the dates we write back are visible everywhere.

If your scanner outputs a different format (like PNG or WEBP), most scanning software will let you choose to save as JPEG, which works perfectly. If you want the highest quality, choose TIFF — it's lossless, so quality won't degrade on save or processing.

JPEG and TIFF behave identically in Google Photos, Apple Photos, and other major libraries — including for the Google Photos description-display quirk noted in the photo-libraries question above.

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.

Our AI typically determines the correct decade and often narrows it down to within a few years. For example, a photo from 1982 might be dated to 1980 or 1983. The important thing is that it ends up near 1982 in your timeline rather than showing up in the year you scanned it.

Timeline Scan combines the clues around each photo: folder and file names, visible timestamps on the front or back, handwriting, known faces and birth years, visual context clues, and neighboring photos in scan order.

A few things you can do to improve accuracy:

• Scan the back of every photo. Handwritten dates, printed timestamps, and faint pencil notes are often the strongest clues.
• Keep related photos in order. Scanner order and neighboring filenames can help when several photos came from the same envelope, album, or event.
• Preserve meaningful names. Folder names, album labels, and filenames like Jul89Sept90_0001.jpg are more useful than generic names.
• Tag known faces with birth years. A person's age can rule out years that do not fit the people in the photo.

If you know the exact dates of certain photos, you're always free to manually adjust them after importing. See how we estimate the original date or read the Scanning Best Practices guide for full details.

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.

We want you to be happy with the results. If the dating doesn't meet your expectations, reach out to us and we'll work with you to make it right at support@timelinescan.com. Your satisfaction and your family memories matter to us.