If I take a picture with my Android phone’s camera, is there any way to email it, or to upload it to a photo-sharing site, without losing the camera’s time stamp? I’m trying to prove that an event occurred at the time I took the picture, but I can’t find any way to share or email the photo in a way that will preserve the time stamp.
I thought taking the photo would be an easy way to positively prove my point, but now it seems the only way I can do that is to go visit the other party in the dispute and show him the photo on my phone. When I try to email the picture to myself and download it, the original date of creation is lost. If I upload to Flickr or Photobucket, the end result is the same. The date on the photo, if there is one at all, is when it was uploaded.
Is there any way I can get this to work? Some setting I’ve overlooked?
The date the picture was actually taken is embedded within the image. If you are using Windos, right click on the image file, select Properties… and check out the Details tab.
I agree with Ford You phone is probably filling in lots of meta data in the image file. It probably also contains GPS coordinates. Some photo sharing sites remove some of this data (GPS usually) out of privacy concerns.
This doesn’t seem to work for me, possibly because I didn’t use a Windows phone to take the picture. I do have an old one, though, so it might be worth trying it out for future use.
On Flickr, view the photo’s page. At the top left of the photo, click the Actions dropdown, then View Exif Info. That will show the Taken On date if your camera sets it.
As others have said, that’s easily manipulated.
Nikon and Canon have (expensive) authentication software that uses cryptographic signatures to detect tampering. It’s intended for forensic and legal use. Both have been cracked.
Your Android phone records EXIF data into the jpeg. Some operation is probably stripping it out (maybe a resize for emailing). Start with the original file copied off your phone. Also, some older versions of Windows can’t display EXIF data without an install. Try looking at the file with a decent photo editor/viewer (IrfanView displays EXIF data).
That shouldn’t have anything to do with it. This isn’t a Windows specific thing, that was just a description of how to view the EXIF data in Windows. EXIF data is embedded by pretty much all digital cameras.
I know there’s a “Date Taken” which is intended for manual entry and editing. But doesn’t the system maintain a value for “date created” which is read-only? I realize that the situation becomes a little more complicated in this case, because we’re talking about a file that wasn’t created on a Windows machine. But I’d have thought even going from one OS to another that preserving the creation date would be a basic requirement.
There is almost nothing on a computer that is read only. There are just varying levels of hoops you need to jump through to modify them. Sometimes the hoops are difficult to jump through such as having root or administrators password others are just having some basic knowledge of what utilities will allow you to modify things.
On windows there is a date modified and date created attributes associated with files. These have little to do with when the picture was taken only when it was copied to the computer. These can be changed easily but you have to jump through hoops to do it. The EXIF data contained within the file is also easily modified.
The creation date of the picture is transferred when you copy the picture from camera to computer to computer. It is the date taken field in the EXIF data. The file is just a bunch of bits that can be modified or not to suit someones needs.
The creation date often does get preserved (though not always). But there’s no protection against deliberate alterations, so that timestamp is useless for forensic uses.
Even on your phone, you can modify the picture’s timestamp.
The other party might believe you if s/he doesn’t really understand technology, but anybody who wants to fake this can easily do so.
