When you don’t know the exact date a photo was taken, sort it into a decade-based folder or album instead — using clues like clothing, cars, printed date stamps or who appears in the photo — rather than leaving it undated altogether.
What you need
- The undated photos you want to sort
- Any family members who might recognise people, places or events in the photos
- Folders or albums named by decade, such as ‘1960s’, ‘1970s’, ‘1980s’
Set up decades before you start
Set up one folder or album per decade before you start sorting, so you have somewhere to put each photo as you go rather than deciding folder names on the fly. It helps to have a family member on hand, even briefly, since they may recognise a person’s age, a car model, or an event that narrows down the decade quickly.
How to tag photos by decade
- Look for a printed date stamp in the corner of the photo, which many photos from the 1970s onward have, as your first and most reliable clue.
- Check clothing, hairstyles and any visible cars or technology in the background, which can often narrow a photo down to within a decade even without a date stamp.
- If people in the photo are recognisable, ask a family member roughly how old that person was when the photo was taken, and work backwards from their birth year.
- Look at the photo’s paper stock, border style or the photo lab’s printed markings on the back, which can sometimes hint at the decade it was processed.
- Move the photo into its best-guess decade folder or album, and note in a caption or filename that the date is approximate, for example ‘circa 1975’.
- For photos you genuinely cannot narrow down, create one more folder called ‘Undated’ rather than leaving them scattered, so they are still easy to find later.
Check every photo has a decade
Look through each decade folder and check the photos in it are broadly consistent with each other in style, clothing and any visible technology, which suggests your decade estimates are reasonably accurate. If a photo looks clearly out of place next to the others in its folder, it is worth reconsidering which decade it belongs to.
If you can’t tell which decade a photo is
If you are stuck on a particular photo, try showing it to more than one family member, since different people often notice different clues — one might recognise a car, another might recognise an outfit from a specific event. Marking a photo’s date as approximate, using “circa” and a decade, is completely fine and better than leaving it unsorted.
Next step
Once your photos are sorted by decade, building a simple timeline for the family collection becomes much easier, since you already have a rough chronological structure to work from.
Sources and date checked
Researched from general published guidance on dating historical photographs by visual clues, not a hands-on test performed for this article. Date checked: 22 September 2026.