Lemke Software GmbH Forum

Is there any limit what the oldest EXIF date can be?

I just noticed that Google Photos does not display dates older than 1902 correctly. For example, date and time:

01.01.1901 08:00:00 is displayed as 06.12.1969 21:09:00.

01.01.1902 08:00:00 is displayed correctly.

So with old images I have to tell the users the correct date in the Caption.

(For some reason my old OS X 10.11.6 and GC 10.6.6 do not handle pre-1921 EXIF dates correctly so I have used exiftool from the command line with such files.)

There is no limit for the Exif year following to the Exif docs.
So, the year can be between 0000 and the current year.

But Google use on their servers a UNIX variant like in macOS.
The UNIX time system starts normally on 1.1.1970. So, that is the oldest possible date/time for a file. Maybe Google uses the system date/time system for storing and managing date/time.

Thorsten