any way to retrieve original date/time from downloaded .jpg ?

[darek]

hi,

I really do know that's most annoying way to ask for help without putting some own work in reading & learning first and normally I wouldn't act as such a lame, but the case is very special and important for me and time is a critical factor so I just can't spend days on learning and trying things from the very basic, especially when I don't even know by now if it makes any sense.

So, my question is if there is any chance to get an original date when an image was actually created with a camera if I have only a .jpg version of it downloaded from a website.
Popular tools like Opanda IExif are not able to read anything ("the file does not support exif information"); I've tried to use ExifTool (GUI) in simpliest way and I got something like this:

---- ExifTool ----
ExifTool Version Number         : 8.19
---- System ----
File Name                       : 399.jpg
Directory                       : E:/dc/
File Size                       : 45 kB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2010:05:20 14:18:15+02:00
File Permissions                : rw-rw-rw-
---- File ----
File Type                       : JPEG
MIME Type                       : image/jpeg
Image Width                     : 768
Image Height                    : 1024
Encoding Process                : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
Bits Per Sample                 : 8
Color Components                : 3
Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling            : YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
---- Composite ----
Image Size                      : 768x1024

When I made a copy and tried rebuilding from scratch (-all= -tagsfromfile @ -all:all -unsafe) the result was the same.

So, does that mean I'm done with it 'couse no data can be recovered?
(to make things easier I just cannot send this file even if someone would be so kind to try to help in that way)

Things look just like that. Please, don't kick the baby, I'm stressed enough.

regards,

darek


ps: sorry for my English, easy to guess it's far from being my native one

/I've read FAQ and tried search option, I swear/

[Phil Harvey]

It is quite simple.  The file in your example doesn't contain metadata.  Many images you download from the internet will have all of the metadata removed to make the file as small as possible.  You can even use exiftool to remove all metadata from an image with "exiftool -all= FILE".

- Phil

[darek]

OK, so that's what I wanted to know for sure - after reading a little about chances that only part of data modules could be deleted and low level tools' features to retrieve the rest.

Thanks very much for your help and best regards

d.