The only real solution to this issue is to convince WhatsApp to change how the app works, something I see as rather unlikely to happen in the near future. Luckily, there is a solution (kinda)! There is no way to truly recover the date taken because WhatsApp strips all EXIF data before the photo is sent and this information is lost forever - assuming that you do not have access to the original photo. Please do not hesitate to leave a comment if you find it useful or if there should be any issues. Works for both images and videos (Android only, sorry iOS 😕 - see comments below). Check out BATCHIFIER if you just want a simple and easy way to fix your images without having to deal with Python and all that. UPDATE: I have finally completed the web app that I briefly mentioned below. Sadly, the app removes all EXIF data that could give any indication of when the photos are taken and this is causing a lot of issues for those of us who backup our photos to the cloud. WhatsApp is also known for optimizing their app to the extreme and most likely this is an attempt to save some kb of memory. I am not exactly sure why WhatsApp is doing this, some people have mentioned privacy as a reason (it’s most likely privacy reasons).

In this post I will explain how you can at least partially fix this problem.

If you are a user of WhatsApp on Android and have gotten a new phone recently, you might have noticed that when recovering the WhatsApp backup all the file metadata is gone! This can be extremely annoying if you, like me, backup your photos to Google Photos or some other cloud service, since it messes up the order that the images are shown in the application. Fixing EXIF date taken field for WhatsApp image backups

How to download whatsapp photos