An AI tool that finds each scanned photo's real date — from printed timestamps, handwriting on the back, tagged faces, and visual cues — and writes it into the file's EXIF so a digitized archive sorts in true chronological order.
Last verified · 2026-07-16 · by Moe Ameen
Timeline Scan is a service from Timeline Scan LLC (based in Lehi, Utah) that solves a narrow but maddening problem with digitized photos: when you scan an old print, the scanner stamps the file with today's date, not the day the photo was actually taken. Import a few thousand scans into Apple Photos, Google Photos, or Immich and they all pile up on the date you scanned them instead of spreading across the decades they belong to. Timeline Scan reads each scan, works out its real date, and writes that date back into the file so the collection falls into true chronological order.
The dating is evidence-based rather than a single guess. Timeline Scan combines several signals for each photo: album labels, box names, and filename patterns like `Jul89_001.jpg`; printed date stamps, photo-lab marks, and faint back-of-print timestamps; handwritten dates, names, places, and captions on the back; people you've tagged with their birth years, so the model can reason from apparent age; and visual context like clothing, hairstyles, cars, decor, print borders, color cast, and film character. It also uses the sequence of neighboring files to place a photo when its own clues are thin. You can optionally tag known faces with names and birth years to sharpen the age-based estimates.
What you get back is the same files you uploaded — pixels untouched — sorted oldest to newest, with the restored date baked into EXIF metadata. Uploads accept JPEG and TIFF. Delivery is a plain ZIP download or, through companion integrations, an export to Apple Photos (an iPhone app writes the corrected dates onto the device), Google Photos, or a self-hosted Immich server. Most archives process within 24 to 48 hours, with larger collections taking longer. There's a free trial with instant results and no credit card; paid plans are one-time and priced by volume — Starter at $49 for up to 500 photos, Family Collection at $149 for up to 2,500, Archive at $499 for up to 10,000, and bulk pricing around $0.048 per photo above that. Uploading is free; you only pay when dating runs.
The honest framing: Timeline Scan is a metadata and organization tool, not an image restorer and not a content tool. Despite "restore" in the pitch, it restores *dates*, not pixels — there's no upscaling, denoising, or colorizing, and it makes no posts, video, or captions. It hands you a correctly ordered, correctly dated archive and stops there. That's exactly what it should do, and it's also where a separate tool has to pick up if you want to *do* anything with those photos.
Timeline Scan's whole job is to answer "when was this taken?" and put the archive in order. Once that's done you're holding something genuinely valuable — a decade-by-decade, correctly dated photo library — but a folder of dated JPEGs isn't content, and this is where Kompozy takes over. Because every file now carries its true date in EXIF, the collection is already segmented by year and era, which is the hard part of building a recurring nostalgia feed. Point Kompozy at the archive and it turns those organized photos into finished posts: a brand-exact Carousel that walks through "1985 in twelve photos," Photo Posts for a weekly "this day, thirty years ago" slot, a Listicle-style vertical short set to music over a run of era-matched scans, and a Blog Article or Email Newsletter that tells the story behind a set — all held to one voice through the Persona Brief.
The payoff is turning a one-time cleanup into an ongoing channel with almost no manual effort. Timeline Scan is device- and library-focused and stops at metadata; Kompozy carries the ordered archive the rest of the way — generating the captions, carousels, shorts, and long-form copy, then scheduling and publishing them across Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and the rest from one queue, with Autopilot dripping a steady cadence of throwbacks instead of you rebuilding each post by hand. For a family historian it becomes a Reels-and-Pinterest nostalgia account; for a photo-scanning or genealogy business, the same dated archive becomes a portfolio and a marketing engine. Use Timeline Scan to date and order the collection; use Kompozy to turn that timeline into content that actually gets posted.
Timeline Scan is a service from Timeline Scan LLC that dates scanned photos. Scanners stamp files with the scan date instead of the day the photo was taken, so Timeline Scan reads timestamps, handwriting, tagged faces, and visual cues to work out each photo's real date and writes it into the file's EXIF metadata, putting a digitized archive back into chronological order.
No. It restores dates, not pixels. Your uploaded files come back unchanged apart from corrected EXIF date metadata — there is no upscaling, denoising, or colorizing. It is a metadata and organization tool, not an AI image restorer.
There is a free trial with no credit card. Paid plans are one-time and volume-based: Starter is $49 for up to 500 photos, Family Collection is $149 for up to 2,500, Archive is $499 for up to 10,000, and larger archives are billed around $0.048 per photo. Uploading is free; you only pay when dating runs.
It accepts JPEG and TIFF scans and returns them as a ZIP download or an export to Apple Photos (via an iPhone app that writes the dates onto the device), Google Photos, or a self-hosted Immich server. Most archives process within 24 to 48 hours, with larger collections taking longer.
No. It dates and orders your archive and stops there — it writes no posts, makes no video or images, and publishes nowhere. To turn a dated, chronologically ordered collection into carousels, throwback shorts, a blog, or a newsletter and schedule them across platforms, you pair it with a content engine like Kompozy.