Almost every phone photo records the date and time it was taken, and many also record where. That information is stored inside the file, separate from the picture, and you can read it in seconds.
On your own phone
- iPhone: open the photo in Photos and swipe up (or tap the ⓘ button). You'll see the date, time, camera and, if it was recorded, a map.
- Android: open the photo in your gallery app and tap the ⓘ or "Details" option.
These only work for photos already in your library. For a photo someone sent you, the app may show the date it was saved, not the date it was taken.
For any photo file
Upload the photo to snapWONDERS. The report shows the original capture date and time, the location if one was recorded (as coordinates, an address and a map), and the device that took it, straight from the file rather than from your phone's library.
A worked example: sunrise on Mount Kinabalu
We checked one of our own photos: the granite peaks of Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, Malaysia, at sunrise, taken on an Android phone with location switched on and copied straight off the phone.
Where. The report reads the GPS coordinates stored in the file, turns them into an address and drops a pin on a map:
The pin lands in Kundasang, the highland town below the mountain. Phone GPS is often accurate only to tens or hundreds of metres, so read a pin as "near here", not an exact spot.
When. The camera recorded the moment it took the photo, 6:04:12 am on 26 April 2026, down to a fraction of a second:
The phone also wrote its time-zone offset, +08:00 (Malaysia), which the report lists under Fingerprinting. So the photo gives away not just the local time but which part of the world it was in, even before you look at the map.
See it as a before and after: where and when from one photo
When the date or location is missing
- Location off. Many phones don't record location unless you turn it on for the camera.
- Shared through an app. Messaging apps and most social platforms strip this information when you share a photo. Some phones also remove the location whenever you share, even to email: Samsung's Gallery has a Remove location data option.
- Uploaded from a phone's browser. Picking a photo in a phone browser can remove its location before it's uploaded. To check a photo's location, upload the original from a computer, copied off the phone over a USB cable.
- Screenshots. A screenshot records when the screenshot was taken, not the original photo.
- Edited copies. Some editing apps drop the original details when they save.
Missing details don't mean a photo is fake. Details that contradict the story, like a date after the event it supposedly shows, are the ones that matter.
See it as a before and after: your phone removed the location before the photo was uploaded
What about working out a location from the picture itself?
Some tools try to guess where a photo was taken from what's in it, like landmarks, signs and terrain. That's a different technique from reading the file, and it's a guess. snapWONDERS reads what the file records; it doesn't guess from the scenery.
Related guides
More guides on
