How to Add a Date Stamp on Photos You Already Took

Search for a date stamp on photos and you get two kinds of answers that never acknowledge each other: camera apps that print the date as you shoot, and browser tools you feed a photo to and type the date into by hand. They solve different problems, and nothing on that results page tells you which problem is yours. Here is the difference, and how to get a date onto the photos already sitting in your camera roll.

How do you put a date stamp on photos?

Three methods turn up, and they are not variations of one idea. They are different tools doing different work.

• A camera setting, applied while you shoot. The phone prints the date as it saves the file. Nothing to do afterwards, and nothing it can do for a photo you took last year.
• A stamper you type the date into. Feed it a photo, fill in a field, download the result. Timemark's online date and time stamper is a fair example of the category: it "adds information you enter to an existing image", and describes what it prints as "a clean date, time, location, and job note".
• A stamp read from the photo's own data. The capture date is already inside the file. A tool that reads it does not need you to remember anything, and it cannot get the date wrong as long as the file still carries it. That is what the Shot On stamp feature does: it reads the EXIF data embedded in your photos and generates a stamp showing the device name, the camera settings and the date.

The third route is the least explained of the three, and it is the only one that can reach a photo you took before you went looking for any of this. Which route you need is decided by one thing, and it is not your phone.

Date it now or date it later — which route do you need?

Answer one question first: are the photos you want dated already taken?

Row one and row two are the two halves of this search. A camera toggle is forward-looking by design: it cannot reach backwards into a library you already shot, so landing in the wrong half means following a set of instructions that cannot be carried out on the photos you actually have.

How to add a date stamp to photos you have already taken

Every photo your phone takes records the moment it was taken, so the work here is reading that field rather than reconstructing it.

1. Start from the original file. Open the photo in your camera roll or your camera folder, not a copy that came out of a chat thread or back down from a social feed. This one step decides whether the rest works.
2. Open the Shot On stamp tool and select the photo. Watermark Maker reads the EXIF embedded in the file and generates the stamp for you. The date arrives as part of that camera stamp, next to the device name and the shooting settings. Everything runs on the phone; nothing is uploaded.
3. Read what it filled in. You can edit the text, so a field that came out empty or looks wrong gets fixed here rather than published as it is.
4. Set the font and color. Light text on a dark photo, dark text on a light one. Keep the type small enough that it reads as a note under the picture rather than a caption competing with it.
5. Save it. The stamped photo saves as a new file, so the original in your camera roll is left as it was. The date is drawn into the image itself, which is the whole point: a date sitting in metadata is invisible to everyone scrolling past.

If the aperture and shutter-speed numbers sitting beside your date are unfamiliar, the explainer on what a Shot On camera stamp is decodes each field.

Doing this to one photo is quick. Doing it to a holiday or a year of a feed is where it becomes a job, so stamps can be applied to individual photos or to an entire photo set at once. Batches of up to 5 photos are free and unlimited batch size is part of the Premium subscription. The complete guide to batch watermarking photos covers the parts that bite on a large set, like checking the design against your darkest photo before you commit a few hundred files.

How to time stamp photos on an iPhone

The honest answer here is not the one the results page implies, so it is worth being plain about it.

There is no date-stamp switch in Apple's camera documentation. Apple's iPhone User Guide page on changing camera settings runs through Photographic Styles, HDR, sound recording options, ProRes and video recording settings, and carries no date-stamp or watermark entry.

You are not the first person to go looking. In Apple's Support Communities, a question posted in July 2023 asks it in exactly these words: "I want date and time stamp on photos clicked by system camera app without using any third party app. Is it possible?" The replies point to viewing the date recorded in the photo's metadata, and to adjusting it, but neither describes a way to print it onto the picture.

So on an iPhone the practical answer is the after-the-fact route. Two ways to take it:

• Type it by hand in Markup, the tool built into the Photos app. Free, already installed, and you retype the date on every photo. The guide to watermarking photos on iPhone has Apple's own steps for it.
• Read it out of the file. The capture date is in the EXIF of every photo your iPhone has ever taken, including the ones from three phones ago, and a stamp tool prints it without you looking anything up.

Date stamps on Samsung and other Android cameras

Samsung is the one big phone maker that documents a camera-side answer, and it is a good one if the photos you care about are still ahead of you.

The page that matters for a date specifically is Samsung's Galaxy camera watermark guide. It says the model name displayed can be edited, and that you "Tap 'Date and time' to turn its visibility on and off." So on a Galaxy the date is not a stamp of its own: it is one component inside the camera's watermark, which you switch on or off next to the phone model.

Getting there is Camera app, Camera settings, Watermark, toggle it on, adjust the settings, per Samsung's watermark setting page — which states the boundary in the same breath: "all newly captured pictures will show your Watermark". Every photo already in your gallery sits outside that, which puts you back in row two of the table above.

Pixel Camera Help's guide to changing your Camera app settings carries no date or watermark entry at all, and its closest-sounding setting, Save location, is the one Google describes as turning photo and video "location stamps" on and off, which is data stored with the file rather than a date printed on it — the Shot on Pixel watermark guide walks that settings list one entry at a time.

Why the date on your photo is wrong

A stamp read from a file is only as honest as that file, and photos lose their capture date more often than people expect.

• Screenshots never had one. No camera fired, so there is no capture date to read. A screenshot of a photo is a new image made at the moment you pressed the buttons.
• A copy that has been through a platform may come back empty. The IPTC, the standards body behind photo metadata, tested the major social sites in Spring 2019 and reported that on Twitter, "metadata is stripped off in SavedAs files". Re-download your own photo from a feed and you may get an image with no capture date attached.
• The forwarded copy is a different file from the one you shot. The photo you sent a friend and the photo in your camera roll are two files, and only one of them is the original.

This is where wrong dates come from. When the capture date has been stripped out, no tool can read it, so you fall back to typing a date into a box, and what goes in the box is only as good as your memory. Guess wrong and you have printed a permanent error onto the picture.

The fix is upstream every time: go back to the camera roll and stamp the file the camera wrote. The same rule governs whether the camera model and settings show up, which the Shot On stamp explainer goes into in more detail.

Start with one photo

Pick a photo you actually care about the date of, open it in the Shot On stamp tool, and see what the file already knows about when it was taken. If the date comes through on that one, it will come through on every other file the camera itself wrote, and you can run the next set as a batch instead of one at a time.

Frequently asked questions

How do I put the date on my photos?

Two routes, depending on whether the photos exist yet. For photos you have not taken, some cameras print the date as you shoot: Samsung documents a camera watermark setting with its own date and time toggle. For photos already in your camera roll, you add the date afterwards with a stamp tool that reads the capture date out of the file's EXIF metadata and prints it onto the image.

Can an iPhone add a date stamp to photos automatically?

Not with Apple's own camera. Apple's iPhone User Guide page on changing camera settings has no date-stamp or watermark entry, and a question posted in Apple's Support Communities in July 2023 asked for exactly this: a date and time stamp from the system camera app without a third-party app. The replies covered viewing and adjusting the date stored in the photo's metadata, not printing it on the picture.

How do I add a date stamp on a Samsung phone?

Samsung's support pages describe it: launch the Camera app, tap Camera settings, tap Watermark, toggle on the Watermark setting and adjust your watermark settings. Samsung's Galaxy camera watermark guide adds that you tap Date and time to turn its visibility on and off, and that the model name displayed can be edited. Samsung states that all newly captured pictures will show your watermark, so it does nothing for older photos.

Can I add a date to a photo I have already taken?

Yes, and this is what camera settings cannot do. Every photo a camera took carries the moment it was taken in its EXIF metadata, written when the shutter fired. A stamp tool opens a photo you already have, reads that date out of the file and prints it on the image alongside the device name and camera settings. It works on any photo that still carries its capture date, whatever year or phone it came from.

Can I put a date stamp on a lot of photos at once?

Yes, using batch processing. Stamps can be applied to individual photos or to an entire photo set in one pass, so a holiday or a year of a feed does not have to be handled one file at a time. In Watermark Maker, batches of up to 5 photos are free and a Premium subscription makes the batch size unlimited. Gather the originals from your camera folder before you start, because a copy that lost its metadata will come out short.

Is it different on an iPhone 15 or an iPhone 13?

No. The model does not change the answer. Both run the same Camera and Photos apps, neither has a date-stamp setting in Apple's camera documentation, and both write the capture date into every photo's EXIF metadata the same way. Whichever iPhone took the picture, the route is the same: add the date afterwards, read from the file rather than typed in from memory.