Remove a date stamp from a photo

That orange '12 15 1998' in the corner of every photo from a film camera or an early digital one. It is not metadata you can switch off — it is burned into the pixels. Painting over it and rebuilding what was behind is the only way to get rid of it.

Remove a date stamp →

Why you cannot just delete it

People often try to remove a date stamp through their photo app's info panel, and find nothing there. That is because there are two completely different things called a date on a photo:

EXIF metadata — an invisible record of when and where the shot was taken. This one you can edit or strip, and if that is what you are after, our metadata remover handles it.
A burned-in date stamp — the orange digits the camera literally painted into the image at the moment of exposure. There is no setting that removes it afterwards, because it is the photo now.

This page is about the second kind. Those pixels have to be replaced with a believable guess at what they were covering, and that is exactly what inpainting does.

How to do it

Upload the photo, or a scan of the print.
Brush over the digits. Cover them entirely and take a couple of pixels extra all round — a leftover fragment of a digit is what makes a result look botched.
Press remove. The area is rebuilt from what surrounds it.
If the stamp sat across two very different things — say, half on a lawn and half on a wall — do it in two passes, one per area. The result is noticeably cleaner.

Why old photos are the easy case

Date stamps have a habit of landing in the bottom-right corner, and corners are usually the least interesting part of a photograph: grass, carpet, sky, a stretch of wall, the edge of a table. Those are exactly the textures inpainting reconstructs best. It is one of the more reliable jobs you can give the tool.

It gets harder when the stamp fell across a face, a hand or a patterned fabric. In that case work in small strokes and check the result at full size before you keep it.

Restoring the rest of the photo too

If you are cleaning up date stamps, the photos are probably old — scanned prints, faded colour, a bit of scratching. Removing the stamp is one job; bringing the picture itself back is another. PicReviver restores faded, scratched, blurry and damaged photos and can colourise black-and-white ones, also free.

The order that works best: remove the date stamp first, restore afterwards. Restoration sharpens and enhances everything it finds, including a date stamp, which makes the stamp harder to remove cleanly afterwards.

Mask the glow, not just the digits

A film date stamp is not clean text sitting on the picture. The camera exposed those digits into the negative with a small orange lamp, so on the print they come with a halo: the numbers themselves, a softer orange bloom around them, and often a faint warm cast in the surrounding area. Scanning adds a little more spread.

That's why a mask drawn tightly around the digits leaves a visible orange ghost — you erased the numbers and kept their glow. What works:

Brush a couple of millimetres beyond the digits, generously enough to swallow the bloom. Look at the photo at 100% zoom and mask out to where the orange genuinely stops, not to where the number stops.
Do the whole stamp in one region if the digits sit close together — the glow between them overlaps, and separate tight masks leave orange in the gaps.
Then check the corner at full zoom. A faint warm tint left over is easy to miss on a thumbnail and obvious in a print. A second small pass fixes it.
If the stamp crosses a face or a hard edge, mask the flat area around it first, look at the result, and only then decide whether the part over the detail is worth a second pass or a crop.

Write the date down before you erase it

Worth pausing over, because it's a one-way step. On a family photo from the eighties or nineties, that orange stamp is very often the only surviving record of when the picture was taken. There's no capture date in the file — a scan carries the date you scanned it, not the day of the birthday party. Erase the stamp and the information is gone from the last place it existed.

Thirty seconds of bookkeeping saves that, and you only get one chance:

Put the date in the filename before you upload: 1994-08-birthday-grandma.jpg sorts correctly, survives every copy and backup, and needs no special software to read.
Or type it into your photo app's date field after importing — most let you correct the capture date, and then the album sorts itself into the right order.
Keep the un-erased scan as the archive copy and use the cleaned version for printing, framing and sharing. Storage is cheap; the stamp is not recoverable.
Doing a whole shoebox? Note the date on the back of each print, or in a simple list, before the scanning session. It's the difference between an album with dates and a pile of undated pictures.

Then erase away. A stamp in a corner over a wall, a lawn, a curtain or a sky is exactly the case that repairs invisibly — which is why this works so well on precisely the photos most likely to carry one.

Common questions

Can I stop my camera adding it? On most cameras yes — look for "date imprint", "date stamp" or "imprint" in the setup menu and turn it off. On a phone it is usually an option inside whichever camera app is adding it.

What if the date is on hundreds of photos? There is no batch mode: each photo needs its own brush stroke, because the stamp sits over different content each time. For a large archive, do the ones that matter.

Questions

How do I remove a date stamp burned into a photo?

Upload the photo, paint over the digits with the brush including a small margin, and press remove. An AI model rebuilds the area from the surrounding pixels. A burned-in stamp is part of the image itself, so it cannot be switched off — it has to be painted out.

Why can't I just delete the date in my photo app?

Because there are two different dates. EXIF metadata is invisible data you can edit or strip. A date stamp is orange digits the camera painted into the pixels at the moment of exposure, and no setting removes those afterwards.

Does it work well on old scanned prints?

Usually very well. Date stamps tend to sit in a corner, over grass, sky, carpet or a plain wall — textures that inpainting reconstructs reliably. It is harder when the stamp falls across a face or a patterned fabric.

Should I restore the photo before or after removing the stamp?

Remove the stamp first, then restore. Restoration sharpens everything it finds, including the date stamp, which makes it harder to paint out cleanly afterwards.