When was this picture taken? I have asked this question a thousand times. A thousand and thirty times, to be exact. It matters when a picture was taken. Whoever wrote this date might have gotten their hand slapped for defacing nobility. But aren’t we glad they did? Maybe the photograph went through a tug-of-war over it.

Photo dates matter if you are building a family album. What grade was he in? Was she overweight? Whose baby is that? Oh! She was pregnant.

Photo dates matter if you need a before and after. Was that hurricane Irma or Joaquin? Did that happen on the same day? A year earlier? Is this the first or second repair job?

In my motherly scrapbooking career, I was secretly grateful for those atrocious neon date stamps added by early digital cameras. Fortunately, they got more subtle over time.

Unfortunately, I was duped many times by incorrect dates due to SOMEBODY not resetting the camera date after the battery died.

I delighted in those faint dates printed on the back of Walgreens-printed photos. After many disjointed photo spreads, I realized Walgreens was printing a print date, not an occasion date. Geez Louise. How can someone wait six months to get their photos developed?

I really adored those delicate, gold dates that Olin Mills stamped on their technicolor portraits. I still adore those. They are little angels, just like their portrait subjects.

Now we have digital photographs coming out of our ears. Dates don’t jump into the picture or onto the back, as if there was a back on a digital picture.

Or is there?

Why, yes, now that I think about it. Digital pictures have date stamps. And if that digital camera was part of a smartphone, that date is as reliable as the atomic clock you once had.

But where?

If you’re lucky, your phone camera uses the date to name the picture. If it doesn’t, be sure to change that in the camera settings.

If someone was thoughtful enough to rename the picture to reflect what’s actually in the picture, you can still find the date. It’s in the picture’s file properties.

On a computer, right-click the picture file and select PROPERTIES, then click the Details tab.

In fact, Big Tech gets smarter by the day. You may be surprised by how much information is being saved on that picture.