Finding date and time that photos were taken

[MarkW68]

Hi,

I received some photos via email. The "Created" date and time in Windows File Explorer is the same as the date and time that they were sent.

I want to find out the date and time the photos were taken.

I used Exiftool, but the "File Creation Date/Time" is the same as the "Created" date and time in Windows File Explorer.

I used the stand-alone Windows executable version, and dragged the image file onto the exiftool(-k).exe file.

Is it not possible to find out the date and time the photos were taken using Exiftool?


cheers

Mark

[StarGeek]

The FileCreateDate/FileModifyDate tags are the file system time stamps for when the file itself was created or modified.  Since the file is coming through email, those will be the time you saved the file from email onto the disk.

If you run this on the command line for that file
exiftool -time:all -G1 -a -s file.jpg

exiftool will then display all time related tags in the file.  If the only times that show up are the file system ones, then the file has most likely been stripped of the metadata. 

Photos that pass through as a text message or are taken from social media sites such as Facebook/Instagram are normally stripped of all metadata for privacy reasons.  If the files are PNG files, they rarely have any metadata to start with as very few apps actually support metadata in PNGs.