Find your way around the timeline

Your Timeline shows every photo and video in your library, newest first. The count at the top tells you how many items you have.

How photos are grouped

Photos are grouped by month, and within each month by day. Each month heading shows how many items it holds. Keep scrolling and older photos load as you go.

The order comes from when each photo was taken, not when you uploaded it. We read that from the camera’s own record inside the file, or from the details another service included when you imported it.

Photos follow the clock where they were taken

A photo belongs to the day on the clock where you took it, not the day where you are now. A photo taken at 11:30 pm in Tokyo on July 14 stays on July 14, even if it was already the 15th at home.

This keeps an evening’s photos together on one day, even when you travel across time zones. When you open a photo, you see the local time it was taken. If the camera recorded its time zone, that appears next to the time, for example UTC+09:00.

Remove photos

Select photos, open More in the bar at the bottom and choose Move to trash to remove them from your timeline. You can undo it for a few seconds, and restore them for 30 days. See Delete and restore photos.

What the small icons mean

Play icon: a video or a live photo.
Video or RAW icon: a video or a RAW camera file we can’t preview yet. See below.
RAW+JPEG: a small badge at the top right. The photo was saved as both a RAW file and a JPEG. See Look at a photo up close.
Heart: a favorite.
Question mark: Date uncertain. See below.
Badge such as “2 copies”: the photo has other copies, and we show you the best one. See Duplicate copies of a photo.

Videos and RAW files without a preview

We can’t draw previews of videos yet, and a RAW camera file only gets one when it has a full-size preview inside it. See Upload photos and videos. Tiles without a preview show an icon labelled Video or RAW file, the file name and the date instead of a picture. The tile doesn’t change on its own, and nothing is wrong. Open it to download the original.

What “Date uncertain” means

A question mark on a photo, and Date uncertain in the photo viewer, mean we couldn’t find a date we trust. That usually happens when:

The file has no date from the camera, so we used the date the file was last changed, or the day it was uploaded.
The camera’s date is clearly wrong, such as January 1, 1970, or a day in the future. Cameras often fall back to dates like these after a battery runs out.

The photo is safe and in your library. It just may sit on the wrong day of your timeline. Videos often show this mark for now, because we don’t read dates from inside video files yet.

You can fix it yourself. See Fix a date.

Fix a date

You can give any photo the date it really belongs to. People with the Contributor role or higher in the library can do this.

One photo. Tap Date uncertain — tap to fix on a photo, or open the photo and choose Edit date.

Many photos. Select the photos, then choose Set date. You can set up to 2,000 photos at a time. If you select more, you’ll be asked to select fewer.

Either way, you first say how well you know the date, under How well do you know it?:

Exact day
Month only
Year only
Decade only

Then fill in the Year, and the Month and Day if they apply. A line reads Will show as and tells you how the photo will look before you save. Choose Save date to finish.

If you know only part of the date, say so. A scan of a photo from 1987 doesn’t have a real day, and we won’t invent one. Approximate photos show with a “c.” (circa) in front: “c. June 1987”, “c. 1987” or “c. 1980s”. They sort in the middle of the period, and they appear under their month, year or decade, not on a made-up day.

Things to know:

Stacks move together. If a photo is in a stack, every photo in that stack gets the new date. They count toward the 2,000.
Future dates are refused. Choose a date that has already happened. Dates before the first photographs, in the 1820s, are refused too.
Your date is kept. If you import the same photo again, we don’t replace the date you set.
A photo you’ve fixed no longer shows Date uncertain.

If something goes wrong

“Couldn’t load more photos. Try again” appears at the bottom. Check your connection, then click it to try again.
A photo is on the wrong day. If it’s marked Date uncertain, the file didn’t carry a reliable date. If it isn’t, the camera’s clock was probably set wrong when the photo was taken. Either way, you can set the right date. See Fix a date.
A video or RAW file shows an icon and its file name, not a picture. That’s the placeholder. The file is safe in your library, and you can open it and choose Download original.
A tile says “No preview yet”. Very large files, and photos we can’t read, get this note. It won’t change by itself, so there is no need to wait or reload. The photo is still safe in your library: open it and choose Download original to get the file.