How to fix Snapchat Memories dates after exporting
Exported Snapchat Memories often show the day you downloaded them instead of the day you took them, because the capture date lives in a separate file, memories_history.json, not inside each photo. To fix it, that date has to be written into the photo’s own metadata (EXIF) and into each video’s header. MemoriesBack does this in your browser, using only dates it can match to a file with certainty.
Why the dates are wrong
When you download your data from Snapchat, each memory arrives as a file such as 2021-03-02_<ID>-main.jpg. The filename carries the day, but most photo apps sort by the date stored inside the file — and when there is none, they fall back to the file’s creation or import time. The full timestamp and location are listed separately in json/memories_history.json.
How to fix them
- Request your data in Snapchat with Memories and Export JSON Files turned on, then download every ZIP part (Snapchat’s instructions).
- Open MemoriesBack and select all the ZIP parts at once.
- The tool writes each memory’s capture date into the photo (DateTimeOriginal with its time-zone offset) or video, in the local time of the place it was taken when a location is known.
- Download the result ZIP and import it into your photo library.
What is matched, and what is not
A date is used only when it matches exactly one file: by the media ID in the JSON, or — when IDs are missing — when one file and one record of the same type share the same UTC day. Nothing is matched by order or nearest time, and a date already inside a file is never overwritten with a different one. Anything left unmatched is listed in manifest.json.
Doing it by hand
Technical users can write dates with tools like ExifTool, reading each timestamp from the JSON. It works, but matching hundreds of entries by hand is slow and easy to get wrong.
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