# Photos in the wrong order? How to fix wrong dates > Camera clocks drift, time zones change and scans have no date. How to spot wrong dates and fix a whole batch at once, so your photos sort in the right order. Source: https://firelet.media/blog/photos-in-wrong-order-fix-dates Published: 2026-09-28 · Updated: 2026-09-28 Applies to: Windows, macOS, Linux Photos in the wrong order almost always have wrong dates: a camera clock that was never set, a trip in another time zone, or scans that carry the day they were scanned. In firelet.media Gallery you select the affected pictures, open **Date and time** with [[Ctrl]]+[[Shift]]+[[D]], and shift or set them all at once. Your original files are never changed. ## Why photos end up in the wrong order The gallery sorts and groups pictures by the date the camera wrote into each file when it was taken. When a file has no such date, the gallery falls back to the date the file was last modified. Almost every ordering problem comes from one of those two dates being wrong. The usual culprits: - **A camera clock that was never set,** or reset itself after the battery ran flat. Its photos land on the camera's factory date, years before you bought it. - **Time zones.** A camera left on home time during a trip is hours out, so breakfast appears after dinner. - **Two cameras on one trip.** Your phone sets its own clock but your camera doesn't, so their photos interleave in the wrong order. - **Daylight saving.** A camera that doesn't adjust itself is an hour out for half the year. - **Scans.** A scanned print is dated the day you scanned it, not the day it was taken. - **Saved copies.** Pictures saved from messages or downloads often have no camera date at all, so they sort by the day they were saved. ## Spot the problem in the calendar Wrong dates are easy to miss in a grid of thumbnails, but they stand out in an overview. Open the **Calendar** panel with [[Alt]]+[[6]]. Its years-and-months grid shades each month by how many pictures it holds. Look for the tell-tale signs: photos in a year before you owned the camera, a busy month when you know you were at home, or a trip split across two days that should be one. ![The Calendar panel with On this day, the grid of years and months shaded by the number of photos, and the list of events](https://firelet.media/help/media/shot-calendar-panel.webp "A shaded month where you don't expect one is often a camera with the wrong clock") A few more ways to find suspects: - **Sort by Oldest first.** Pictures dated to a camera's factory default pile up at the very start. - **Statistics** ([[Alt]]+[[8]]) lists the oldest and newest pictures, and a **By year** breakdown. - **Advanced query** ([[Alt]]+[[9]]): `has!=date` lists pictures with no date of their own, which are sorting by their file date instead. - **Filters → Camera** separates one camera's photos from another's, which is exactly what you need when two cameras disagree. Press **Read camera data** there first, so the gallery knows which camera took what. In the viewer, the caption line under each picture shows when it was taken, and the info panel ([[I]]) shows it under **When**. ## Shift a whole batch When a set of photos is out by the same amount, as with a camera on the wrong time zone, fix them all in one go. 1. Select the affected pictures. For a trip, filter to the camera and the trip's dates, then press [[Ctrl]]+[[A]]. 2. Press [[Ctrl]]+[[Shift]]+[[D]], or right-click and choose **Date, place and copyright** → **Date and time…**. 3. Choose **Move them all by** and enter the difference in days, hours and minutes, forwards or backwards. 4. Click **Apply**. Every selected picture moves by exactly the same amount, so the order within the batch stays as it was. The status bar confirms how many moved and by how much. To work out the difference, find one photo where you know the true time. A picture of a station clock, a phone screen, or a moment you remember well (the plane landing, the cake coming out) is ideal. Compare the time the gallery shows with the real one, and that's your shift. > [!TIP] > If you'd rather not do the arithmetic, choose **Set the first to** instead and enter the true date and time of the earliest picture in your selection. The rest move with it and keep their spacing. ## Set an exact date for scans Scanned prints are the extreme case: every one is dated the day it went through the scanner. The fix is the same tool, used a little differently. 1. Select the scans from one occasion or one period, for example a wedding album or the prints from one summer. 2. Press [[Ctrl]]+[[Shift]]+[[D]]. 3. Choose **Set the first to** and enter the best date you know, such as 1 June 1987 at noon. 4. Click **Apply**. The whole batch moves to that date and keeps the order you scanned it in, so an album scanned page by page stays in sequence. If you only know the year, pick the middle of it. A roughly right date puts the print among its neighbours, which is far more useful than the scan date. Add a caption such as "about 1987" in the info panel if you want to record that it's an estimate. For another situation, there's **Use each file's own date on disk**. It dates each picture by its file's modified date, which helps when a camera wrote nonsense but the files came straight off its card. [Dating old scanned photos](https://firelet.media/blog/date-old-scanned-photos) goes further with scans, including adding the place. ## Check the result Go back to the **Calendar** panel and sort by **Oldest first**. The trip should now read in order, and the stray month should have emptied. In the viewer, [[Ctrl]]+[[←]] and [[Ctrl]]+[[→]] jump to the first picture of the previous or next day, which is a quick way to walk through a corrected trip. Made a mistake? Select the pictures, open **Date and time** again and click **Back to the file's date**. The pictures return to the date stored in the file. > [!IMPORTANT] > Corrected dates are stored in the gallery's library, and the photo files themselves are never changed. Other programs see the corrections only if you write XMP sidecars (right-click → **Write metadata to XMP**, or **Write changed pictures** in the Albums & keywords panel). Exported copies don't carry the corrected dates either. To review everything you've corrected so far, type `has=corrections` into Advanced query. The [help guide to fixing wrong photo dates and times](https://firelet.media/help/fix-photo-dates-and-times) covers every option in the window, and [browsing by date](https://firelet.media/help/browse-by-date-calendar) shows what the calendar, events and **On this day** can do now that your dates are right. With the dates fixed, you can also reorganise the files themselves by date. Right-click → **Move to** → **Organise into date folders…** files each picture into dated folders, in a layout you choose such as year then month, using its corrected date. Its stars, keywords and albums go with it. See [how to move, rename and sort photos into date folders](https://firelet.media/help/move-and-rename-photo-files). These tools are in the Windows app today, and the macOS and Linux builds, which are being finished, have the same **Date and time** window. ## Questions ### Can I fix a whole trip at once? Yes. Select all the photos from the trip, open Date and time and apply one shift; they all move by the same amount. ### What about scans with no date? Set the date by hand with Date and time…; an approximate year is far better than the day the print was scanned.