Updated September 2026
Older point-and-shoot and film cameras used to burn the date directly into the corner of every photo — a habit modern phone cameras dropped entirely. The date is still recorded, just invisibly, in the photo's metadata. Here's how to get a real, visible date stamp back on photos from an iPhone or an Android phone, without installing an app.
Camera apps on iPhone and Android record the capture date in EXIF metadata (the DateTimeOriginal field) rather than printing it on the image, because that's more flexible — the date stays out of the way of the photo, and any app that needs it can read it programmatically. The tradeoff is that the date disappears the moment you screenshot the photo, print it, or share it somewhere that strips metadata — leaving no visible record at all unless something puts it back on deliberately.
Because iPhone and Android both export standard JPG/HEIC/PNG files with the same kind of EXIF metadata, a single browser-based tool handles both without needing separate iOS and Android apps. On the timestamp tool: open it in your phone's browser (or on a computer with photos transferred over), drag in the photo or photos, and the tool reads the real capture date from each file's EXIF automatically and pre-fills the stamp — no typing dates by hand.
iPhones save photos as HEIC by default since iOS 11, and this tool's EXIF reader and stamping pipeline are built around JPG, PNG, and WebP. If your iPhone photos are still in their original HEIC format, run them through the HEIC to JPG converter first (also fully local, also free) — the converted JPG keeps its EXIF date, and from there the timestamp tool reads it the same way it would for any other photo.
Most Android phones (Samsung, Pixel, OnePlus, Xiaomi and others) record EXIF dates the same standard way, but a handful of manufacturer camera apps or third-party camera apps have historically shipped with EXIF writing disabled or incomplete by default. If a photo shows "no EXIF date detected" in the file list, the tool falls back to the file's own modified date — usually close to correct — and you can always set the exact date yourself, per photo or across a whole batch.
Plenty of photo editors can add text to an image, but most require manually typing the date yourself for every photo — tedious past a handful of images, and error-prone if you're trying to match each photo's actual capture date rather than "whatever I remember." Reading the real EXIF date automatically is the specific thing that makes stamping a whole camera roll practical instead of a manual chore per photo.
Whether you're on an iPhone's Safari, an Android's Chrome, or a desktop browser, the stamping itself runs as JavaScript inside that browser tab — the photo is decoded, stamped on an in-browser canvas, and exported, without a network request at any point. That matters more on a phone than people often realize: a lot of "add timestamp" mobile apps and websites quietly upload the photo to process it, which for personal camera-roll photos is a meaningfully bigger privacy exposure than it sounds.
Do I need to install anything? No — it's a website, works in your phone's existing browser, and needs no app install or account.
Can I stamp a whole album at once from my phone? Yes, subject to how many photos your phone's browser can comfortably hold in memory at once — for very large batches (100+), doing it in a couple of smaller passes is more reliable than one giant batch.
Will it work offline, on a phone with no signal? After the first page load, yes — the tool is a static page with no server dependency once loaded.