Some Android phones/versions have a bug that cause the EXIF DateTimeOriginal/DateTimeDigitized to be set to 2002:12:08. Recently I had a chance to dig into the library provided by Qualcomm, and found the offending string.

It turned out the date in question is the default string used as a placeholder. The application using the library is expected to override the date by calling exif_set_tag function. Unfortunately, not everybody consider metadata to be important, so sometimes this gets left out.

The copyright start date on the files is said to be 2002 so I guess some milestone was reached on 8th of December, 2002.

If only all the phone software was open source that would not have been an issue – the fix would have been ready in minutes, but in our current real world it is a matter of months, years, eternity or workaround such as my Acer EXIF Fixup. Once the device is out the user is left one on one with the bugs (should it be “one on many?”).