Old EXIF dates

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matti
Posts: 32
Joined: Sat Dec 31, 2016 12:13 pm

Old EXIF dates

Post by matti »

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.)
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forum_adm
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Re: Old EXIF dates

Post by forum_adm »

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
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