The main problem
Why is every Snapchat photo the same date?
Updated
Because the export was stamped with the day Snapchat built it, not the day you took the photo. The files come out with no EXIF at all (no DateTimeOriginal, nothing), so every photo app falls back to the file's creation date, which is the moment it landed on your disk. Eight years of memories then pile onto one afternoon.
The dates aren't gone
They're in the archive, just not in the photos. Open the json folder inside your export and you'll find memories_history.json: a list of every memory with its capture time in UTC and, usually, its coordinates. Snapchat ships the metadata next to the media instead of inside it.
So nothing has been lost. It just needs writing back into the files, where Google Photos, Apple Photos, Immich and everything else actually look.
Why it isn't a one-line fix
The list has no field naming the file each entry belongs to. Your photos are called things like 2021-10-07_C45000BA-E542-409E-9A4E-C74223CFE277-main.jpg, and that id appears nowhere in the JSON. So matching has to be worked out rather than looked up.
The filename carries the day, but a busy day can hold dozens of memories, and pairing them by order puts the wrong time and the wrong place on a lot of photos. This site matches each file to its own entry exactly, so every photo gets its own time to the second. On a real 3,630-file export from 2017 to 2026, every file matched. Locations work the same way.
Doing it yourself
- exiftool Free, excellent, and will happily write DateTimeOriginal from a value you supply. You'll still have to parse the JSON and decide which entry belongs to which file, which is the hard part.
- Don't just rename the files. A filename with a date in it doesn't move a photo in your timeline. Photo apps read EXIF; the name is decoration.
- Don't re-save through an editor. Round-tripping a JPEG through a converter often drops the EXIF you just wrote, and always costs quality.
What correct looks like afterwards
Photos land at the moment they happened, on the clock of the place you took them, spread across every year you used the app. Videos have no EXIF, but an MP4 keeps a creation time in its own header, and that is what Apple Photos, iCloud and Google Photos read to place a video. That field gets the real capture time too, along with the filename, and the location goes into the video as well.
Whose clock the times are on
Snapchat records only UTC. Each time is converted to the local time of the place it was taken, worked out from its own location, summer time included. A memory with no location takes the time zone of the nearest one taken that day, or failing that, your computer's. The CSV names the time zone of every file.
Putting it back
This site reads the JSON Snapchat shipped alongside your media and writes the real dates, coordinates and captions back into the files, in your browser, with no upload and no account. The first 500 files are free, so you can check the result before deciding whether it was worth $5.