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So I got this (old?) photo right here (shown below, face hidden) and I want to estimate how old it is, any clues? It already looks noisy and low-quality to be recent, so what can I do to find the age? I can provide other pics if needed. Thanks enter image description here

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Is this a physical photograph on paper, or a digital computer file? \$\endgroup\$
    – MathematicalOrchid
    Commented Sep 10, 2016 at 12:30
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    \$\begingroup\$ @MathematicalOrchid Physical \$\endgroup\$
    – WalidSabihi
    Commented Sep 10, 2016 at 12:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ I may be wrong though as I only have that image JPG now nothing else \$\endgroup\$
    – WalidSabihi
    Commented Sep 10, 2016 at 12:32
  • \$\begingroup\$ This digital image suffers from heavy JPEG compression - which may skew anyone's guess. The only thing you have to go on here is fashion styles, and that's not a reliable or accurate way to date a photograph. Also, we can obviously state that the photo was taken after colour photography became commonplace. \$\endgroup\$
    – osullic
    Commented Sep 20 at 10:58

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Clothing, hair, makeup, facial hair, furniture, cars, landmarks, etc... those can all be used to make an educated guess. Although we can't see all of that in this image.

Beyond clues in the image content itself, nailing a specific creation date of a scanned image will be difficult. Someone might have an idea of the film used if it was shot on film, but that isn't a home run either.

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This jpeg is unfortunately so lossy that it probably isn't going to be helpful for analysing things like film grain or fading. Even then, it would only give an idea of the film used, not necessarily how old the image is. It would tell you how old it couldn't be, but not much more.

With the actual paper photo, a little bit more might be able to be determined by how the pigments have faded if the storage of the image is well known, but without a lot of details, actually analysing the content of the image is your best bet, just like dpollitt already went in to.

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