A digital photo carries its capture date in a block of metadata called EXIF, written by the camera at the instant the shutter fires. The picture and that date are two separate things riding in one file, and most of the steps between a phone in a technician's hand and a folder on your server quietly drop the second one.
The date is a passenger, not part of the picture
EXIF is a standard block of technical fields attached to a JPEG: capture date, camera model, exposure settings, and often GPS coordinates. The field you care about is DateTimeOriginal, one entry in the block the Library of Congress documents here.
That is not the date your computer shows in a file listing. That one is the file modification time, and it resets whenever the file is copied, converted or re-saved. Sorting a folder by date tells you when the files last moved, not when anyone stood in the unit.
Most ways of moving a photo rewrite it
Some of the stripping is deliberate. Messaging and social platforms remove EXIF on upload because GPS coordinates inside a personal photo are a privacy problem, so discarding the block is their safe default. Your inspection photos travel the same pipe as everyone's holiday photos.
The rest is incidental. Re-encoding an image to shrink it, exporting from a photo library at reduced size, or pasting a picture into a document can each produce a new file with an empty EXIF block. Screenshots are the worst case, because a screenshot is a brand new image whose capture date is the moment someone pressed two buttons, months after the fact.
Test your own pipeline in five minutes
Do not reason about it. Measure it, with the phones and apps your team uses.
- Take one photo on a staff phone.
- Send it to yourself by every route you use in practice: messaging app, email, maintenance software, inspection app, shared drive.
- Save each arrival as its own file, named for the route it took.
- Check each file for a capture date. On Windows, right click, Properties, Details, and look for Date taken. On a Mac, open it in Preview, then Tools, Show Inspector, and read the Exif tab. A blank field means the date is gone for good.
- Write down which routes survived, and use only those for photos you might need later.
Most teams find at least one route that destroys the date, usually the convenient one.
Then stop asking the file to carry the proof
Even a surviving EXIF date is weak on its own, because anyone can edit it with free software. What makes a photo credible is where it was stored, when it landed there, and whether that store logs its own behaviour.
Canadian evidence law is built on the same idea. Under the federal Canada Evidence Act, whoever puts an electronic document forward carries the burden of proving it is what they say it is, and the best evidence rule is met by proving the integrity of the system that recorded or stored it. Provincial evidence statutes carry their own versions. The thing being examined is the system, not a field inside one file.
So put the photo into a record that stamps it on arrival: the work order, the inspection entry, the tenant file. Upload during the visit, not on Friday from a camera roll. A system that logs "photo added Tuesday at 9:14 a.m. by this user to this work order" does something EXIF cannot do alone, whether or not the metadata survived the trip.
The cost of getting this wrong is never visible on the day. It arrives eighteen months later, when a deposit dispute turns on whether a scuff was there at move-in and the only photo you can find is a screenshot dated the afternoon you went looking for it. Run the test this week.