How old is this picture

How to find out when a picture was taken

Do this on the original file, before you drop it into the tool. Choosing a photo here does not edit the original. The browser builds a new JPEG for the request, shrinks the long side to 1024 pixels, and that JPEG carries no camera metadata, because a canvas export does not keep it. Read the date first. The upload is then analyzed in memory and never stored.

The date you want is the one the camera wrote when the shutter fired. A folder's Date modified, the day a message arrived, and the day you scanned a print are dates of a copy.

When the date on the file is missing or wrong

A photo saved from a chat or a social post is often a new file that app made. If Date taken is missing on the copy you received, the camera date did not survive the trip. The day the message arrived is not the day of the photo. Check the camera roll if the original is still there.

A screenshot is a new picture of a screen. Its date, when it has one, is the moment of the screenshot. A scan is a new file too: a date the scanner writes is the day of the scan, not the age of the paper.

The camera clock is ordinary data. Phones that set themselves are usually close. A camera that was never set, or that was adjusted later in Photos, can show a neat date that is still the wrong day. Keep a second clue: another frame from the same sitting, a lab stamp, or a birth year you already trust.

How to date an old photo

A paper print has no EXIF. Date the object, then the scene. A process tells you the years it cannot predate, and a wide span of years when it was in use. It does not pin one year, and a process that has gone out of fashion can still be used later.

• Mirror-like, on a silver-plated copper sheet, usually in a case: a daguerreotype. The Library of Congress says the process was announced on 19 August 1839, that each plate is a unique direct positive, and that popularity declined in the late 1850s once the ambrotype was available.
• The Library's classroom chronology puts common use of the daguerreotype at about 1840 to 1860, the ambrotype in the 1850s and 1860s, and the tintype from the 1850s into the 1930s. Those windows overlap on purpose.
• A tintype is on iron, not tin, despite the name. A magnet that sticks is a check that the plate is iron. A cased image that does not stick may be an ambrotype on glass.
• A carte de visite, in that chronology, is a small albumen print on a card of about two and a half by four inches, listed for the 1850s and 1860s.
• Cabinet cards, mounts of about 6.5 by 4.25 inches, were introduced in the United States in 1866 and stayed popular until about 1900, according to the Library's cataloging note.
• A US revenue stamp was required on photographs in 1864, 1865, and 1866 (Library of Congress thesaurus). That dates a sale in that window. Cabinet cards begin in 1866, so a stamp is not a feature of a later cabinet card.

Clues in the frame, then a birth year

Clothes, hair, a car, a shop sign, or a building can support a bracket. A thing in the frame supplies a not-before year, because the photo cannot predate it. It does not supply a not-after year: the car, the sign, or the building can stay in the scene for a long time. Studio sitters often wore their best, so fashion can lag the year, especially for an older sitter or one far from a city. Use those clues to check a date you already have. Do not let them overrule a date written at the time.

If you know who is in the photo and the year they were born, add the apparent-age range to that birth year. The tool above is for that range only. Suppose the person was born in 1948 and the report's range is 22 to 30. Those ages fall in 1970 through 1978. That window holds only if the range is right.

The model is asked for a range that is usually 4 to 8 years wide. A reply wider than 20 years is reset to 10 years either side of the integer. A reply narrower than 2 years is opened to 1 year either side. The ends then stay inside 1 and 100, so a face near those edges can finish with a shorter span. Add the low and the high, not the single integer. This site does not publish an error score for the estimator. The range on the card is the band to use. Why a small average miss in published tests of other systems still hides a large miss, and why a grainy print is a worse file than those tests, is on how to read an estimate.

The report addresses the face as you, including on an old print. It refuses two or more clear faces, so crop to the person whose birth year you know. It is not an ID check and it does not read a date. For a readable face on a scan, the age detector is the same estimator with notes on grain and low resolution. Someone else's photo, and the rule about permission, is on how old does she look. Your own selfie, cue by cue, is on How Old Do I Look AI.

The earliest copy on the web

A family print that was never posted will not be found. An empty search does not make the print new, and it does not make it old.

For a picture that might already be online, open Google's image viewer, choose About, then Learn more about an image. Google's help says About this image can show when Google may have first seen that image or a visually similar one, plus pages where a similar image appears much earlier than the other results. The feature is only in some regions. Google also says credit and source-type metadata can be edited, so a label under the image is not the shutter date. A similar image is not this image: the date can belong to a different photo that looks alike.

TinEye calls its date first found on: the day its crawler indexed a copy, not the day the photo was taken and not the day it was first posted. TinEye's own example is a photo taken on 21 July 2008 whose oldest match is 31 October 2009. Sort by oldest when you want that crawl order. A match from years before a caption that says yesterday is a reason to distrust the caption. It is still not a year for a print that never went online.

Questions about dating a picture