WhatsApp Image Date Restore

A simple command line tool for restoring the EXIF creation date of WhatApp images.

WhatsApp removes all EXIF information of images you received. This includes information of when the images was taken. This program lets you restore these dates by extracting the original date from the filename. Since the filenames follow a specific pattern IMG-<date>-WA<number>.<extension> (e.g. IMG-20160315-WA0020.jpg), we can extract the creation date (more precisely the date when the image was received) and write it back into the file.

Usage

• Download the latest release from the releases page and extract the wa-date-restore.zip file
• Open a terminal and navigate into /bin
• Start the program by typing ./wa-date-restore (on Linux or OSX) or simply wa-date-restore (on Windows)
  • Remeber to define the input folder with -d <path> and activate "EXIF date overwrite" with -e

All files contained in the input directory will be processed and then saved into the folder /wa_date_restored inside the input directory.

Program Arguments

Usage: wa-date-restore [-d <path>] [-e] [-h] [-l]

 -d,--directory <path>   Full path to the directory in which all files
                         should be processed.
 -e,--exifDate           Overwrite the EXIF "DateTimeOriginal" and
                         "DateTimeDigitized" tag with the extracted date.
                         (This is what you normally want to do.)
 -h,--help               Print this help message.
 -l,--lastModifiedDate   Overwrite the "Last Modified Date" with the
                         extracted date.

Usage Example

user@Tower-Mint ~/Desktop/wa-date-restore-1.0.1/bin $ ./wa-date-restore -d /home/user/Downloads/Photos -e
Processing IMG-20160315-WA0021.jpg: [EXIF Date -> 15.03.2016 12:00:00]
Processing IMG-20160315-WA0018.jpg: [EXIF Date -> 15.03.2016 12:00:00]
Processing IMG-20160315-WA0020.jpg: [EXIF Date -> 15.03.2016 12:00:00]
user@Tower-Mint ~/Desktop/wa-date-restore-1.0.1/bin $ 

Now the EXIF date tags have been set to the extracted date:

Contribution

If you have any questions or run into problems, please open an issue. Feel free to contribute to this project by opening a pull request or forking the repository.