How do I remove a date stamp from an old photo?

Scan or photograph the print, upload it, zoom in, and paint over the date digits plus 3 to 5 pixels of the orange glow around them with a small brush of about 20 to 35 pixels. Press Remove and the AI rebuilds the corner. Guests get 2 removes a day and signed-in users 2 more.

Why is there still an orange tint after removing the date?

The mask covered the digits but not the halo. Film date stamps were burned in by an LED and the colour spread into the emulsion around each number, so the visible digits are smaller than the affected area. Run a second pass with a slightly wider mask over the tinted region.

Does removing the date change the rest of the photo?

No. Only the pixels you brush are regenerated. Faces, composition and the rest of the scene come back exactly as scanned, which is why a date stamp in a corner is one of the safest edits there is.

Can I remove a date stamp printed across a face or a subject?

You can, but treat it differently. Over sky, sand or a wall the fill is invisible. Across a face the model will invent facial detail that may not match the person, so for family photos it is usually better to accept a slightly imperfect result than a convincingly wrong one.

What resolution should I scan at?

600 dpi for a standard 6×4 print gives the model plenty of detail and leaves room to crop. Higher is fine — files over 1536 pixels on the long edge are downscaled for processing, so for archival work consider running the removal on a tight crop of the corner and compositing it back into the full-resolution scan.

How to Remove a Date Stamp from Old Scanned Photos

By the MagicRemover team · August 4, 2026 · 6 min read

In short

Scan the print at around 600 dpi, zoom in, and paint over the digits plus the orange glow around them with a small 20–35 px brush, then press Remove. The glow is the whole trick: a film camera burned the date in with an LED and the colour bled into the emulsion, so the affected area is noticeably wider than the numbers look. Mask only the digits and you get a clean shape with a warm smudge around it.

Open the date stamp remover →

If you are digitising a box of family photos, you have met the orange date. Cameras from roughly the mid-eighties to the early 2000s printed it straight onto the negative, and it now sits in the corner of a large fraction of the pictures worth keeping. It is one of the most satisfying things to erase — and slightly trickier than it looks, for a reason specific to how it was made.

Before & after

A burnt-in date stamp erased from a scanned photograph — before

A burnt-in date stamp erased from a scanned photograph — after

Before / After

Why date stamps are harder than they look

The colour bleeds

A film date stamp was exposed onto the negative by an LED, and the orange spreads into the emulsion around each digit. On a scan you can see a faint halo well beyond the numbers themselves. Mask only the digits and that halo survives as a visible smudge.

Scanning adds its own softness

Flatbed scans of small prints are often slightly soft, so the boundary between digit and background is gradual rather than crisp. There is no clean edge to snap a mask to; you have to over-paint deliberately.

It usually sits in the worst place

Bottom-right corner — which on holiday photos is very often sand, sea, grass or a busy foreground rather than plain sky. The corner is also where lens vignetting darkens things, so a fill matched to the average brightness can read too light.

The four steps that work

1
Scan at a higher resolution than you think you need
600 dpi for a 6×4 print is plenty and gives the model far more to work with than a 150 dpi scan. If you are photographing prints with a phone instead, shoot in even, indirect light and get square to the print — a keystoned photo makes every subsequent edit harder.
2
Zoom in before you brush
Use Cmd/Ctrl + to enlarge the browser view until the digits fill a good part of the screen. Almost every failed date-stamp removal is really an under-painted mask, and you cannot paint accurately what you can barely see.
3
Paint the halo, not just the digits
Use a small brush — 20 to 35 pixels — and cover the numbers, the colons or slashes between them, and 3 to 5 pixels of the orange glow surrounding the whole group. Treat the date as one block rather than tracing individual characters; a single sweep across the line rebuilds more cleanly than six separate marks.
4
Run it, then inspect the corner at 100%
Press Remove and give it around twenty seconds. Then zoom to full size and look specifically for a warm cast where the stamp used to be. If there is one, the halo was not fully covered — hit Continue edit, brush a slightly wider area, and run once more.

Keep the original scan

This is worth saying for family archives specifically. The date is metadata about your own history — often the only surviving record of when a photo was taken. Erase it from the copy you are going to print or share, and keep the untouched scan alongside it. Once the digits are gone from every copy, that information is gone for good, and the AI cannot put it back: it reconstructs surfaces, it does not remember what was there.

In short

Before & after

Why date stamps are harder than they look

The colour bleeds

Scanning adds its own softness

It usually sits in the worst place

The four steps that work

Scan at a higher resolution than you think you need

Zoom in before you brush

Paint the halo, not just the digits

Run it, then inspect the corner at 100%

Keep the original scan

Questions about date stamps

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