By Joeri Westendorp, Product & Tech · Published 28 October 2026
You can put a date on a photo in a few taps, on an iPhone or an Android phone, and it helps to know exactly what that date is: a value your device wrote down, from a clock you can change, in data you can edit afterwards. For keeping your own photos in order it is fine. To show someone else when a photo was taken it is weak, because they have no reason to trust your device, and that gap is where an independent timestamp comes in.
There are two. The one you can see is printed onto the picture, the day and time in a corner. The one you cannot see sits in the file’s metadata, the field a gallery app calls “date taken”. They look different, but they share an origin: both come from your phone’s clock at the moment it saved the image.
On an iPhone the built-in camera does not print a visible date onto the picture, so a stamp in the corner comes from a separate camera app. The date the phone recorded does travel with the file, and Photos will even let you change it: open a photo, tap the info button, and choose Adjust Date & Time (opens in a new tab). You can move it forward or back, in a batch if you like, and revert it later.
Android works much the same way. Google Photos shows the date and time of a photo and lets you edit them (opens in a new tab): open the photo, tap the menu, then the pencil by the date. A visible stamp on the image again comes from a camera app that burns one in.
None of this is a trick. It is in the standard, official apps, a tap away. Which is exactly the point of the next section.
Because you can set it. A phone’s clock is whatever the phone says it is, and you just saw that the date on a saved photo can be moved in the official Photos app. A visible stamp is only pixels, so it can be edited like any other part of the picture, and the hidden “date taken” is ordinary metadata that free tools can rewrite or strip. So a date on a photo tells you what the device, or whoever edited it, put there. It does not tell anyone that the photo was taken then.
For your own use that is usually enough. It becomes a problem the moment it has to convince someone with no reason to take your word for it: a landlord, an insurer, a client. At that point the question is not what the photo says, but why anyone should believe it, and a date the sender could have typed does not answer that.
An independent timestamp is the difference between a date you wrote and a date someone else vouched for. A qualified timestamping service records that a file existed in exactly this form by a certain moment, and signs that record, so anyone can check it later without trusting you or us. Change the file afterwards and the check fails. That is a real, checkable fact about the file, which a date in the corner never is.
It is worth being precise about what it shows, because this is where other services overreach. A timestamp sets an upper bound: the file existed by then. With a lower bound as well you get a window, not an exact instant. It does not pin down the second the shutter fired, and it says nothing about what the photo shows. It fixes time and integrity, and leaves the rest to the viewer. That narrowness is what makes it hold up.
EverStamp keeps the two apart on purpose. The stamp bar you see in the app shows your phone’s clock, and it is labelled as that: a time the device states, not a time we vouch for. Alongside it the file carries an independent, qualified timestamp, applied when the file is closed, and that is the time a recipient checks. On the report it reads “stamped on”, never “created on”, because the created date would be the one you can edit, and the stamped one is the only time that stands up.
So the honest version of “put a date on a photo” is two dates, kept clearly apart: the one your device claims, and the one an independent service will vouch for. Keeping them separate is the whole job.
The built-in camera does not print one on the image, so a visible stamp comes from a separate camera app. The date your phone recorded is stored with the file, and you can view or change it in Photos under Adjust Date & Time.
No. It comes from your device clock, which can be set to anything, and both the visible stamp and the hidden date taken can be edited. It shows what your device recorded, not a fact another person can rely on.
Yes. The date taken is ordinary metadata, and common tools, including the standard Photos apps on iPhone and Android, can change or remove it. That is why it cannot stand on its own in a disagreement.
A date stamp is a value your own device writes. An independent, qualified timestamp records that the file existed in this exact form by a certain time, in a way anyone can check without trusting you.
How C2PA records where an image came from, and where it stops.
Read more →The chain from the camera to the recipient, and the time window it records.
Read more →The free verification page, in the browser, for a file you have received.
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