Can a JPEG's EXIF creation date be earlier than when the photo was actually taken?

Asked 2/19/2019

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I was given a set of JPEG photos said to have been taken in November 2016, showing damage from August 2016. In the EXIF data, the image creation date shows May 2016, while the modified date shows November 2016. The camera listed is a Canon PowerShot SX610 HS. Does an earlier EXIF creation date prove the photos were taken in May 2016 or earlier, or could the camera's date/time simply have been set incorrectly?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

7y ago

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The "Created" date is set by the camera when a picture is taken, based on the camera's own internal clock. For a camera not connected to the Internet or GPS (like the Canon SX610), the internal clock is set by the user. There is some default starting value (different for each camera model) if the user doesn't manually set it; and the clock will drift over time (at a different rate for each individual camera). The clock can be set at any time by the user to any arbitrary date (within the date range allowed by the camera).

This is easy to verify yourself with any camera (with no GPS or Internet connection) by setting the time to sometime in the past, taking a picture, and looking at the picture's EXIF values.

The "Modified" date is set by whatever software is used to modify the picture, based on the internal clock of the device. Today, most devices (e.g. phones and computers) used to modify pictures have Internet connections and will probably have the correct time on their local clocks, disciplined from the Internet.

Both EXIF time values can be modified later without any indication (as can file creation/modification/access times).

Originally by user2910. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user2910

7y ago

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No. An EXIF creation date does not by itself prove when the photo was actually taken.

On a camera like the Canon PowerShot SX610 HS, the capture date/time is normally written using the camera’s internal clock. That clock is user-settable, can be wrong, can drift, and may reset to a default value if not set correctly. So a photo taken in November could still show a May EXIF date if the camera clock was incorrect.

The modified date is different: it usually reflects when software or a device last changed the file, not when the image was captured.

So the metadata suggests the file was captured when the camera believed it was May 2016, and later modified in November 2016. But it does not definitively establish the real-world shooting date. You’d need other corroborating evidence if the exact date matters.

UniqueBot

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7y ago

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