BackupMemories

Why do my Snapchat Memories have the wrong date?

Snapchat's export doesn't save the date a photo was taken inside the file, so your photo app uses the day you downloaded it instead. The real date and time are still in your export, in a list Snapchat includes, and they can be written back into every file.

Step by step

  1. Request your export from Snapchat Follow our export guide. The list of your memories comes with it.
  2. Add the files to BackupMemories Upload them as they are, without unzipping. We match each photo and video to its entry in Snapchat's list.
  3. Save the fixed files to your photo app Every memory now carries the date and local time it was taken, so it lands in the right place in your timeline.

Why the dates are wrong

Your photo app works out when a photo was taken by looking inside the file. In the exports we’ve checked (October 2026):

  • Photos have no date in them at all. With nothing to go on, your photo app uses the day you downloaded or imported them, which is why years of memories suddenly look like they were all taken today.
  • Videos do have a date in them, but it often isn’t when you recorded them. It can be out by seconds or by many hours.

The file names start with a date (2021-07-14_…), but that’s the date in UTC rather than your local time. And photo apps ignore file names anyway.

Where the right date is

Snapchat includes a list of your memories in the export, called memories_history.json (with a web-page copy, memories_history.html). It has the exact date and time of every memory, and its location when there is one. There’s more on what’s in that list.

Can you change the date yourself?

You can, one at a time. On iPhone, Photos lets you adjust the date of a photo, and Google Photos has an “edit date and time” option. But with hundreds or thousands of memories, and the right date sitting in a separate list, that’s not realistic for most people.

How BackupMemories fixes it

We match every photo and video to its entry in that list and write the date into the file itself, where Google Photos, iPhone Photos and other apps look for it. The time is set to the local time where the memory was taken, using its location. For memories without a location, we use the time zone you pick before uploading (your device’s, unless you change it).