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 settings that print the date as you shoot, and tools you feed a finished photo to. Only the second kind reaches the pictures already in your camera roll, and it needs one thing from you first — the actual date. Here is where to find it and how to get it onto the image.

How do you put a date stamp on photos?

Either the camera prints the date as it saves the file, or you add it afterwards to a photo you already have. In the second case the date is text you supply. Timemark's online date and time stamper says exactly that of its own tool: "This free tool adds information you enter to an existing image." Watermark Maker's Shot On stamp is the same on this point.

So the typing is the easy part. What decides whether the stamp is worth anything is where the date comes from, and if you still have the original file, your phone already knows it.

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

1. Look up the real capture date first. On an iPhone, open the photo in Photos and swipe up: Apple's guide to seeing photo and video information lists "The date and time the photo or video was taken" among the details shown. On a Pixel, Google's help page on changing your Camera app settings says you can view a timestamp for any photo by tapping the photo in the bottom right corner, then More.
2. Open the Shot On tool and pick the photo. On the home screen the tile is Shot On, described as "Camera stamp with EXIF data". Pick an original from your gallery — the app has no camera of its own, so the file has to be on the phone already. Shot On stamps are a Premium feature.
3. Read what got filled in. The app reads six EXIF fields (camera make, model, focal length, aperture, shutter speed and ISO) into two editable lines: BRAND TEXT, arriving as something like "Shot on iPhone 16 Pro", and CAMERA SPECS, as something like "50mm · f/1.8 · 1/500s · ISO 200". The capture date is not among the six. It is not read, and it is not printed unless you put it there.
4. Type the date into one of the two lines. Both are ordinary text fields. BRAND TEXT holds 60 characters and CAMERA SPECS holds 80, which is room for a date on either.
5. Pick the style, position and colour. STAMP STYLE offers Pill, Card and Bar. POSITION is LEFT, CENTER or RIGHT along the bottom edge, and Bar spans the full width and ignores it. COLOR THEME is LIGHT or DARK, and each draws its own translucent plate behind the text (LIGHT is white text on 60% black, DARK is near-black text on 70% white), which is why the stamp stays readable over either kind of photo.
6. Export. The stamped photo saves as a new file and the original in your camera roll is left as it was.

One thing about that export: the app copies the original's metadata into the new file, so a stamped photo can still carry its own capture date inside the file even though nothing prints it on the picture. That copy takes everything the original had, GPS included, and it falls back, silently, to saving without metadata if that step fails, so it is not guaranteed.

What to type, and how to write the date

Both lines are free text. Four things worth deciding:

• Spell the month out. "12 March 2026" cannot be misread. "12/03/2026" is read as 12 March by some people and 3 December by others, and a stamp outlives the post it was attached to.
• Put the date on the line it fits. CAMERA SPECS already joins its parts with a middle dot, so appending "· March 2026" matches the line it lands in. If you want the date on its own, type over BRAND TEXT instead — nothing forces the "Shot on" wording.
• Decide how precise to be. A holiday reads fine as a month and a year. A build log, a damage report or a delivery photo needs the day.
• Keep one format across the set. "March 2026" on one photo and "03.2026" on the next reads as assembled rather than shot.

How to time stamp photos on an iPhone

There is no date-stamp switch in Apple's camera documentation. Apple's iPhone User Guide page on changing advanced camera settings covers the Main camera's default resolution, View Outside the Frame, Prioritize Faster Shooting, Lens Correction, Scene Detection, whether photos taken in Messages are saved, and lens cleaning hints. It carries no date-stamp or watermark entry.

You are not the first person to go looking. In Apple's Support Communities, a question posted on 3 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?" More than 600 people have marked it "Me too". Its two replies cover seeing the capture date and changing it, one noting "You'd have to do this per photo, however", and neither describes a way to print it onto the picture.

On an iPhone that leaves the after-the-fact route, and two ways to take it.

• Markup, built into the Photos app. Free, already installed, and every photo is a fresh piece of freehand typing and positioning. The guide to watermarking photos on iPhone has Apple's own steps for it.
• A camera stamp. The device name and the settings arrive filled in, the layout is fixed, and the date is the one field you add.

Date stamps on Samsung and other Android cameras

Samsung is the one big phone maker that documents a camera-side answer.

Getting there, per Samsung's watermark setting page: launch the Camera app, tap on the Camera settings, tap on Watermark, toggle on the Watermark setting, adjust your watermark settings. The same page states the boundary in its final step: "Once set up all newly captured pictures will show your Watermark." Everything already in your gallery sits outside that.

The date is a component inside that watermark rather than a stamp of its own. Samsung's guide to adding and editing a watermark, last updated in October 2023, says you can "edit the model's name displayed by tapping the Edit icon" and that you can "also tap 'Date and time' to turn its visibility on and off", alongside a Font setting and left, centre and right alignment icons.

One sentence on that page is worth reading before you switch it on: "Once a watermark has been applied to a photo it cannot be deleted." A camera watermark is written into the picture at capture; a stamp added afterwards is a separate export that leaves the original alone.

Pixel Camera has no equivalent: its Camera app settings guide carries no watermark or date entry, and location stamps are a different feature — the Shot on Pixel watermark guide sets out what that page does document, and why location stamps is not the setting you are after.

Why the date on a stamp comes out wrong

Because you typed it. The risk concentrates on photos whose own record of the date has gone missing, where there is nothing to copy from.

• Screenshots never had one. No camera fired, so the file holds no capture date. 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 about a dozen sites in Spring 2019 and reported for Twitter: "Metadata is stripped off in SavedAs files."
• A shared copy is not the original. Work from the file sitting in your camera roll, not one that came back to you through a chat thread. Only one of the two came off the camera, and it is not the one that travelled.

When the record is gone the date comes from memory, and a wrong one gets drawn permanently into the picture. The fix is upstream every time: go back to the camera roll, open the original, read the date off its information panel, and stamp that file. The same rule governs whether the camera model and settings arrive filled in, which the Shot On stamp explainer covers in more detail.

Start with one photo

Pick a photo you actually care about the date of. Read the capture date off its information panel and compare it with the date you would have typed from memory. Then open the Shot On stamp tool, put the real one on, and see how it sits at the bottom of the frame. If you want the same date across a whole event rather than a different one per photo, that is a job for batch watermarking with a text watermark instead.

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 with its own Date and time toggle. For photos already in your camera roll, the date goes on afterwards as text. Look the capture date up in the photo's information panel first, then type it into a stamp, so you are copying it rather than guessing.

Does a Shot On stamp print the photo's capture date automatically?

No. Watermark Maker reads six fields out of a photo's EXIF — camera make, model, focal length, aperture, shutter speed and ISO — and the capture date is not one of them. What you get is two editable lines, BRAND TEXT and CAMERA SPECS, pre-filled from those six fields. A date appears on the photo because you typed it into one of them.

Can an iPhone add a date stamp to photos automatically?

Not with Apple's own camera. Apple's iPhone User Guide page on changing advanced camera settings covers resolution, View Outside the Frame, Prioritize Faster Shooting, Lens Correction, Scene Detection and lens cleaning hints, and carries no date-stamp or watermark entry. A question posted in Apple's Support Communities in July 2023 asked for exactly this. The replies covered seeing and changing the date stored with the photo, not printing it onto the picture.

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

Samsung's support pages describe it: launch the Camera app, tap on the Camera settings, tap on Watermark, toggle on the Watermark setting, then adjust your watermark settings. Samsung's 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 put a date stamp on a lot of photos at once?

Only if they all get the same date. Batch processing applies one design to every photo in the selection, so a date typed into a text watermark lands identically on all of them. That is right for a single event and wrong for a mixed set. Per-photo dates mean one photo at a time: read the capture date off the original, type it, export, and move to the next.

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 on both you can see when a photo was taken by opening it in Photos and swiping up. Whichever iPhone took the picture, the route is the same: look the date up there, then add it to the image afterwards.