Whatsapp removes Exif properties

When backing up the photos from my mobile phone to my laptop, and then to Google Photos I noticed something odd: when syncing, most of the photos were shown as it were created just at that moment, even if some images were months older.

This is quite inconvenient.

Then I noticed not all the photos backed to Google Photos had this problem, and a deeper look at the EXIF properties of two different files confirmed my assumptions: Whatsapp removes these properties when sharing photos.

These are the Exif properties of a “good” photo:

And the Whatsapp ones:

This has been discussed as well in Quora. Apparently, this saves some extra bytes and helps to compress the photos sent. Also, it contributes to keep privacy. I understand the motivations, but it is a Pain in the Ass.

What properties am I talking about? simple ones, such as Creation and Modification date.

When syncing photos to Google Photos, if these values are not found, then the application just fills in the appropriate ones, using the sync time-stamp as new value, thus losing all time-relevancy when sorting photos.

The only option I have found is to install Google Photos in my mobile, and have Whatsapp photo folders to automatically sync, however for limited data budgets this may be an issue (not my issue currently).

My first approach was to try and automate something using ExifTool. There is also a Node.js library called exif-date-infer, which seems able to infer the Exif date properties from the photos filename, and write back these properties to the file… but what is the file name convention used by Whatsapp? when importing the images to my laptop the images seem to be renamed as IMG_XXXX.