View and Display Date Picture Taken and Camera Model Metadata of Photos in Windows Explorer
When you take a photo with digital camera, it’s not only the scenery and the people that was captured and stored in your memory card in a image file. Together with the image file, a metadata which contains valuable information and description about the photo is also stored internally in the digital picture file. The extra information include date and time picture was taken, width, height, resolution, bit depth, equipment make, camera model, color representation, flash mode, focal length, F-number, exposure time, ISO speed, metering mode and compensation. Not all fields of metadata is useful for everybody, as it’s mainly for classification and analysis of photos at later time. If you just need to see simple metadata about the images, Windows Explorer or any Explorer window can display the most commonly used fields of metadata – Date Picture Taken and Camera Model natively.
If you save and store your images in My Pictures folder, you should be already seeing Date Picture Taken column in Windows Explorer or My Pictures window. If you don’t see it, it’s because you don’t choose the listing in Details view. To change the view of the folder, simply click on View icon or View menu, then select Details.

The best thing about keeping your photos in My Pictures folder or any other folders that been designated as Pictures or Photo Album is that you can arrange the photos and pictures by Date Picture Taken On or Dimensions.
If you don’t see the Date Picture Taken header column in Details view, or want to add in Camera Model metadata to be displayed on Details view, or you don’t want to assign and customize the folder as Picture or Photo Album folder, you can enable and show both Date Picture Taken On and Camera Model as columns in the Details view of any folder.
Right-click the column header area to open the column header menu options. Click Camera Model. The camera model used to take each picture will be displayed in the folder, along with the file name, size, and type. By adding the Camera Model column, you can now sort the pictures in this folder based on the cameras used to take them.
- Change to Details view if you haven’t already done so.
- Right-click the column header area to open the column header menu options.
- Click Camera Model to display the camera model used to take each picture in the folder, along with the file name, size, and type.

- Right-click the column header area to open the column header menu options again.
- Click on More at the bottom.
- Choose Details dialog box appears.
- Scroll down the list of options to locate Date Picture Taken.
- Select (tick) the check box next to it. A green check mark will confirm that you have selected it.

- Click OK.
You can now view information on when the photos or pictures were taken on and the camera model used to shoot the photos in one listing. You can also now sort the folder image listing according to the date and time pictures was taken in chronological order and by camera model which shot the photos, simply by clicking on the column header respectively.
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October 2nd, 2007 00:01
You are actually burning the data to the CD; you just cannot display it. Right click/properties on a file and you’ll see it. For some reason, XP pro will not display this column of data when read from the CD. XP home will. If you find the resolution to this, let us all know.
June 17th, 2007 09:53
Tony – did you get an answer to this??? I am having the same problem and really need some help.
Thanks!
March 18th, 2007 03:09
I don’t have a problem viewing ‘date picture taken’ ‘dimensions’ etc in explorer but I can’t get this meta data to burn to a cd via XP or Nero. Any suggestions on how to do it?
February 4th, 2007 14:20
[...] sort properties for digital photos in Explorer when it’s in Details view. Previously, only Picture Taken On and Camara Model can be read and displayed by Windows XP natively. The features of Microsoft Photo Info [...]