$0 Free Mac app · no account · no limits
Timeline Tagger is a free photo date editor for your Mac, one scan at a time. It shows you the photo and its back together, you type what the handwriting says, and the date goes into the file itself. Add a location too, if the back tells you where. Then it shows you the next one.
FRONT
Built by Timeline Scan, our separate paid service that dates scanned photos for you.
Four moves, then repeat
The whole app is built around one loop, because that is the whole job: read the back, type the year, press Return.
Choose the folder your scans landed in. No importing, no library, no copying half a shoebox somewhere else first.
The photo and its scanned back sit side by side. The handwriting you need is on screen while you type, not in a window behind this one.
Type the year, and the month and day if you have them. Drop a pin, or press a number key for a place you already saved.
The date and place are written into the photo and its back, and the next one comes up. Changed your mind? Command-Z puts it back exactly as it was.
Into the file, not into an app
Timeline Tagger is a plain photo metadata editor underneath: it changes the photo date and adds the location in the ordinary fields every photo app already reads. Move the file, back it up, hand it to a cousin: the date goes with it.
A scan with no date lands in your photo library on the day you scanned it, which is how a 1972 Easter ends up between last Tuesday and a screenshot. Writing the real date fixes that everywhere at once, because every app reads the same fields.
Only the metadata is rewritten. The picture itself is copied through untouched, so a dated JPEG is pixel-identical to the scan that went in, and undo restores the old values exactly.
The parts that save the evening
Dating photos one at a time is only tedious when the app fights you. These are the three places where it doesn’t.
A scan named with the _b suffix is treated as the back of the photo before it. It never shows up as its own entry to date, and it quietly gets the same date, place, and caption as its front.
That is the convention FrontBack Scanner saves, so a shoebox scanned there opens here already paired. Using a different scanner? Change the suffix in Settings.
Half a shoebox was taken in the same three places. Save each one with the name your family calls it, then apply it with a single number key for every photo after that.
Don’t know the coordinates? Search for the address or the landmark, or just click the spot on the map.
Most old photos will never have a day, and pretending otherwise is how people stall out. The month and the day are optional fields here, so “1972” is finished, not skipped.
The app keeps showing you the precision you entered; the file gets the exact date photo apps need to sort it into the right year.
Pricing
Not a trial, not a teaser, not a photo limit. The whole app, free forever.
The full app · every feature
When the box is bigger than the evening
Ten seconds a photo is fine for a hundred photos. It is most of a weekend for a thousand, and nobody finishes the second box.
Timeline Scan is the online service that made this app. Upload your scans and it reads the handwriting on the backs, the faces, and the clues in the picture itself, then writes a date into every file. Try it free.
Date my photos automaticallyTimeline Tagger starts with files. If your photos are still prints in a box, FrontBack Scanner is our other free app: it scans a bedful at a time and pairs every back with its front, which is exactly the folder this app wants.
Get FrontBack ScannerQuestions
Timeline Tagger is a free Mac app for putting a date and a place on scanned photos by hand. You point it at a folder of scans and it walks you through them one at a time, showing each photo beside its scanned back so you can read the handwriting while you type. When you press Return it writes the date, the place, and any caption into the file itself and moves to the next photo.
Yes. The whole app, free forever, with no account, no watermark, no photo limit, and no subscription. It is made by Timeline Scan, whose paid online service does the same dating automatically for people with more photos than evenings. That service is entirely optional and this app never asks for it.
Any Mac running macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer, on Apple silicon or Intel. The download is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without security warnings.
Not yet. A Windows version is being built and will use the same file formats, the same saved places, and the same suffix pairing, so a shoebox started on one machine can be finished on the other. The Mac version is out now.
No. Only the metadata is rewritten; the image data is copied through untouched, so a dated JPEG is pixel-identical to the scan that went in. If you would rather not touch the originals at all, switch the write mode to copy and Timeline Tagger writes tagged copies into a folder you choose. Undo and redo work for the whole session.
By filename suffix. photo_0001.jpg and photo_0001_b.jpg are treated as one photo with two sides, so the back never shows up as its own entry in the queue and inherits the front’s date, place, and caption. That is the same _b convention FrontBack Scanner saves, and the suffix is configurable if your scanner uses a different one.
Type the year and move on. The month and the day are optional fields, so 1972 is a complete answer. Timeline Tagger keeps the precision you entered on screen, and writes the first day of the year or the month into the file, which is what photo apps need in order to sort the picture into the right decade. If you want a second opinion on a photo with nothing written on the back, our free what-year-was-this-photo-taken check will guess from the picture.
Into the standard fields every photo app reads: EXIF DateTimeOriginal, IPTC DateCreated, and the XMP dates (photoshop:DateCreated, exif:DateTimeOriginal, xmp:CreateDate). A place is written as real GPS coordinates in the EXIF GPS block, and a caption goes to ImageDescription, IPTC Caption-Abstract, and dc:description. Apple Photos, Google Photos, and Immich all read these on import. There is more on why scans get the wrong date in the first place in our guide to fixing scanned photo dates.
No. Timeline Tagger reads and writes files on your own disk. There is no account, no upload, and no cloud processing. The only network requests it makes are the map tiles and the place search when you use them, plus its check for a new version.
Then be honest with yourself about the arithmetic: even at ten seconds a photo, a thousand scans is most of a weekend. Timeline Tagger is the right tool for a box you want to go through yourself, and for the stubborn photos no software can figure out. For a whole archive, Timeline Scan reads the handwriting and the picture itself and dates every photo for you. It is a paid service, and it is the reason this free app exists.
Free, private, and about ten seconds a photo.
Too many photos to do by hand? Let Timeline Scan date them
Still scanning? Get FrontBack Scanner, read our scanning best practices, or see what to do after scanning.