One of my pet peeves is the ugly red date that sometimes gets stamped onto the lower right corner of a photo. (That, and people who talk in the movie theater.)

Before digital cameras became popular, that date stamp was almost ubiquitous, since many 35mm point-and-shoot cameras burn the date onto your photos when you press the shutter release. Thankfully, those days are largely behind us. Digital photos have the time and date they were taken embedded in metadata, so you can find that info by checking the file details on your PC.

But if you use a scanner to convert your old prints to digital images, you're going to run across photos with that old date stamp. And believe it or not, I still see the occasional digital camera that writes the date in the corner of the photo, despite the easy access to metadata. If those date stamps bug you as much as they bother me, then you'll be pleased to learn that it's easy to remove them from your photos. Let's see how. (And if your camera stamps your photos with the date, be sure to check your user manual for instructions on how to turn that feature off!)

Just Crop It Away

The easiest way to eliminate the date stamp is to use your photo editor's crop tool. The date stamp is almost always positioned in the lower right corner of the image, where a little surgery might not affect the rest of the photo very much.

Check out this old scanned photo. I bet we could crop it and not lose anything important--in fact, a little cropping might help. I'll use Adobe Photoshop Elements for this exercise, but you can follow along in any other photo editor.

Click the Crop tool (it's the tenth item from the top of the toolbar) and make sure the Aspect Ratio is set to No Restriction in the Options palette at the top of the screen. Next, click and drag a crop box in the photo until the date stamp is gone, like the image linked here.

Don't Lose the Date

Just because we don't want the date splattered across the front of the photo doesn't mean we want to lose that info. You can easily add the date the photo was taken to your image file's metadata.

One of my favorite tools for this task is Windows Photo Gallery, which comes with Microsoft's Windows Vista. If you don't use Vista, you can download Windows Live Photo Gallery--a free, enhanced version of the Vista program.

To add the date taken to the file's metadata, find your newly cropped photo in Photo Gallery. Right-click the file and choose Change Time Taken. Now adjust the date to match the original date stamp, and click OK.

Clone It Away

You might not always want to crop your photo to eliminate the date stamp. Instead, you could use your photo editor's Clone tool to wipe it out. Consider a photo like the one linked here. This beautiful scene was captured by reader William Horton from Colorado Springs, Colorado. The regular background behind the date makes it a great candidate for this kind of surgery.

Open the image file in your photo editor (again, I'll use Photoshop Elements). Choose the Clone Stamp tool, found in the 15th cubby from the top of the toolbar. Set the size of the clone brush to about 30 pixels (for larger photos, you'll want to increase the brush size) and Alt-Click an area very close to the date stamp. Then just paint the date away until all you can see is the rippling water, as in this photo.

When you're done, don't forget to add the date to the image file's metadata.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Sleeping Fairy's Nightlights," by Gianna Stadelmyer, Fredericksburg, Virginia

Gianna writes: "I was taking photographs of my daughter while she played in her woodland fairy outfit in the backyard. She was starting to get tired of 'posing,' so I suggested she lay down on the grass and pretend to be asleep. She did and the full-color version was very sweet. I decided to make it look more like nighttime by layering a bluish tone version with Paint Shop Pro and adding the 'fireflies' with an AutoFX plug-in."

This Week's Runner-Up: "Diversity," by Olga Fedulova, Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Olga writes: "I used a Canon PowerShot S2 1S to take this photo. Last summer I was at a beach in Estonia and there was a plethora of ladybugs. To make it look a little more interesting, I used Adobe Photoshop to change the color of four ladybugs."

See all the Hot Pic of the Week photos online.

Have a digital photo question? Send me your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself. And be sure to sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.