My digital camera takes pictures with a very high resolution, and I have a PIL script to shrink them to 800x600 (or 600x800). However, it would be nice for the resultant file to retain the original timestamp. I noticed in the docs that I can use a File object instead of a name in PIL's image save method, but I don't know if that will help or not. My code is basically name, ext = os.path.splitext(filename) # open an image file (.bmp,.jpg,.png,.gif) you have in the working folder image = Image.open(filename) width = 800 height = 600 w, h = image.size if h > w: width = 600 height = 800 name = name + ".jpg" shunken = image.resize((width, height), Image.ANTIALIAS) shunken.save(name) Thank you for any help you can give!