Why did all of the timestamps change to today's date when transferring photos to SD card?

echan07

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I asked this earlier but am now registered...

I transferred a folder of downloaded photos (from texts, FB, etc) from internal storage to my SD card and now all of the pics are time stamped with today's date. Is there a way to fix this? My gallery is a hot mess now. I have a Samsung S7.

Thanks
 

mustang7757

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I asked this earlier but am now registered...

I transferred a folder of downloaded photos (from texts, FB, etc) from internal storage to my SD card and now all of the pics are time stamped with today's date. Is there a way to fix this? My gallery is a hot mess now. I have a Samsung S7.

Thanks
Hi, welcome!
It shows that because today date is when the transfer happened.
 

B. Diddy

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It's hard for me to comment, since that's not how I organize my pics. My understanding is that file operations like Move or Copy will timestamp the file to the time the operation was done. The problem is how the gallery app you're using sorts photos -- a good gallery app should use the EXIF data that's embedded in the photo, which includes the time/date that the photo was taken. But there are plenty of gallery apps that only use the time/date associated with the file creation or file edit.

One of our Trusted Members @ManiacJoe often suggests this gallery app that sorts using EXIF data: Piktures
 

mustang7757

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It's hard for me to comment, since that's not how I organize my pics. My understanding is that file operations like Move or Copy will timestamp the file to the time the operation was done. The problem is how the gallery app you're using sorts photos -- a good gallery app should use the EXIF data that's embedded in the photo, which includes the time/date that the photo was taken. But there are plenty of gallery apps that only use the time/date associated with the file creation or file edit.

One of our Trusted Members @ManiacJoe often suggests this gallery app that sorts using EXIF data: Piktures
Yeah he's pretty good with this .
 

echan07

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So possibly if I use a different gallery app it would sort them correctly? It just seems quite dumb that simply transferring to an SD card would change the date of the picture. I've now got several hundred pictures from today in my gallery. I've tried to Google and found people with similar problems but not many solutions.

I'm using whatever gallery app that came with the phone- icon is an orange flower.
 

hallux

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The way it works in the Windows world - moving keeps the "created" date the same while copying changes that date. This is because copying is creating an entirely new file. However, moving is the LAST thing you want to do as you risk loss of the file if the move is interrupted (moving takes it away from the original location, leaving no way to recover).
 

B. Diddy

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So possibly if I use a different gallery app it would sort them correctly?

This depends on the EXIF data in the photo. If these are photos taken by someone's camera app (and not a random jpg downloaded from a website), then a good gallery app should be able to sort by Date Taken. Give Piktures a try and see if it works.
 

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