DateShift

Your camera clock was wrong — and now every photo says it happened at the wrong time.

You changed the battery and forgot to reset the clock. You flew across time zones and the camera never got the memo. Or you shot a wedding with two cameras, and now the two sets of photos refuse to sit in the right order. DateShift diagnoses every photo's three dates — EXIF time, file time, and the date hiding in the file name — repairs them with one relative offset, and hands you back verified copies plus a report that proves what changed. Your originals are never touched.

Get DateShift — $9 one-time

Date Maths: the hero feature

Other tools make you set every photo to one fixed time — which destroys the order of a whole shoot. DateShift works the way the problem actually happened: your clock was off by an amount, so every photo is off by that same amount. Enter the offset once (say, −5 h 37 m for a clock that ran fast) and every photo moves by exactly that much. The gaps between your photos — the story of the day — stay exactly as shot.

Relative shift — one signed offset in seconds, applied to EXIF times and file times together
Preview before you commit — run Scan Only first: the diagnosis report lists every conflict (sources differing by more than 1 second) before anything is written
Sync all three sources — one checkbox writes the same corrected time into EXIF and file time, so your photo app, your file manager and your file names finally agree

Dual-camera sync — the part nobody else does for you

Two cameras at one event, two clocks, one timeline that doesn't line up. Every other tool makes you work out the difference by hand. DateShift does the arithmetic: pick one photo from each camera taken at the same moment, and it computes the offset and applies it to the whole second-camera folder. In our seeded test, camera B ran 83 seconds slow; DateShift computed 83.000 seconds and aligned all 3 second-camera photos to camera A's times with 0.000 s error.

Copies only — and a report that proves it

Originals never modified. DateShift only ever writes copies to a new output folder. In our own tests every original stayed byte-identical (SHA-256 verified).
Pixel data untouched. Only timestamps change. Decoded-pixel hashes were unchanged on all 10 processed files in the seeded test.
Every copy is re-read. The re-check report confirms EXIF and file time agree within 1 second — or flags the file instead of passing it.
Honest sources. A photo dated from its file name is labelled filename; a scanned photo with no date anywhere is labelled file_only and its file time is shifted without inventing an EXIF date.

Before / after — our seeded acceptance test, measured

	Before	After DateShift
5 photos, clock fast by 5 h 37 m (20220 s)	EXIF and file times all 20220 s ahead of reality	EXIF error 0.000 s, file-time error 0.000 s on all 5; re-check 5/5 green
Photo with no EXIF, filename IMG_20230610_091530	No EXIF date at all	EXIF 2023-06-10 09:15:30 written from the filename, source labelled filename
Scanned old photo, no EXIF, no dated filename	Only a file date: 1998-05-02 12:00:00	File time shifted to 13:00:00 exactly, source labelled file_only
Dual-camera: A correct, B 83 s slow	Two folders that won't interleave	Computed offset 83.000 s; 3 B photos aligned with 0.000 s error
Your originals and pixels	untouched	untouched (pixel hashes unchanged on 10/10 files; originals byte-identical on 12/12 files)

Full seeded acceptance run: 41/41 checks passed. The 5-photo shift ran in 0.01 seconds on the test machine.

How it works

Open DateShift, pick the folder of photos — run Scan Only first if you like; it writes nothing
Enter the offset in seconds (or use dual-camera mode: pick one same-moment photo from each camera and let DateShift compute it)
Or fix: get verified copies plus the diagnosis and re-check report, and replace your library files yourself once you've read the green report

Windows 10/11. No account, no subscription, no upload — your photos never leave your computer.

Get DateShift — $9 one-time