Guide
Snapchat photos showing 1970 or 2052? Why the year is wrong
You opened your exported Snapchat Memories and a few of them are dated 1970, 2052, or some other year that makes no sense. Nothing is broken and nothing is lost — the photo simply has no date written into it, so your photo app filled the gap with a placeholder. Here’s what’s really going on, and how to put the correct year back.
Why a snap shows 1970, 2052, or today’s date
Every app reads a photo’s date from the date field inside the file’s own metadata — EXIF DateTimeOriginal for photos, the QuickTime creation-date atoms for videos. Snapchat’s export leaves that field blank and keeps the real capture date in a separate memories_history.json file instead. When the field is empty or zero, each app falls back to whatever default it prefers: some use the date you imported (so everything stacks on today), some use the Unix “epoch” of January 1, 1970, and some users report odd far-future years such as 2052. These are fallback symptoms of a missing date, not a value Snapchat deliberately stamps in.
Why the year is sometimes wildly off, not just slightly
A slightly wrong date usually means a real date was read and adjusted for a time zone. A wildly wrong one — 1970, 2052 — almost always means no date was read at all, and the app substituted a sentinel value. That’s why the fix isn’t to nudge the year a little; it’s to supply the genuine capture date the file never had. The good news is that genuine date already exists in your export, so this is recoverable rather than guesswork. A 1970 stamp is simply a date of zero seconds since the system’s clock starts counting; the exact placeholder differs by app, but the cure is always the same — give the file the real date it is missing.
The fix: write the real capture date into each file
The reliable fix is to read the true date for every memory from your export and write it into each file’s metadata, so apps stop guessing. MemoriesExport does exactly that: it takes the export you already downloaded from Snapchat, pulls the capture date and GPS for each item from memories_history.json, and writes them into the photo’s EXIF date field and the video’s QuickTime atoms. Once that’s done, the strange years disappear and everything sorts to when it actually happened. It runs on the whole export at once, so it works the same whether one snap shows 1970 or thousands do, and large exports that arrive as several mydata~*.zip parts are handled together rather than one file at a time. The full walkthrough is in fixing Snapchat timestamps.
If your problem is “everything is on today’s date”
A garbage year on a few items and every photo landing on today’s import date are two faces of the same blank-date cause, but they show up differently per app. If your specific symptom is a whole Snapchat import piling onto today in Google Photos rather than odd individual years, the targeted guide is Google Photos showing the wrong date after a Snapchat import. The repair is identical: get the real dates into the files first, then re-import the corrected copies.
Frequently asked questions
- Why do only some of my exported snaps show a weird year?
- Different apps fall back differently when a photo has no readable date. One app may use the import date, another the Unix epoch (1970), and some people report odd far-future years like 2052. Which fallback you hit depends on the app and the file, so a handful of items can look stranger than the rest even though the underlying cause — a blank date field — is the same for all of them.
- Does the 1970 or 2052 date mean my photo is corrupted?
- No. The image data is fine; only the date field in the file's metadata is blank, so the app shows a placeholder. The real capture date is still recorded in your export's memories_history.json and can be written back into each file.
- Will fixing the date also sort my photos correctly?
- Yes — once the real capture date is in each file, Apple Photos, Google Photos and Windows sort by it automatically. One honest caveat: for several snaps captured on the same day, Snapchat's export gives no per-item time inside that day, so the exact within-day order can't always be perfectly reconstructed. The date and location are restored reliably.
- Can I just edit the year by hand instead?
- You can, but it's impractical at scale — you'd be retyping dates for hundreds or thousands of files, and videos need a separate metadata atom most editors don't touch. Reading the correct dates straight from your export and writing them in one pass is far faster and more accurate.