If you prefer a graphical user interface then find a photo viewer/editor which lets you see all of the metadata written into a photo file. If you're comfortable with using the command line, try Exiv2 which is very powerful for viewing, copying and editing metadata. Select the Choose an image on your device option. Select Get to add EXIF Viewer to the browser. (The file access/creation date shown in your operating system is unlikely to be the EXIF image creation date.) This is how you can have a look at metadata for your photos with that Edge extension: Open the EXIF Viewer extension page in Edge. But make sure you browse all of the metadata in your image file in case you're simply not using software which reads all of the data available.

If your software truly is editing or deleting the creation date in your photo metadata then you're unlikely to find any way to recover it.

In theory it's possible to embed data (usually a copyright watermark) inside the image data, but a professional photographer is unlikely to use this method in the master file because it does (subtly) alter the image and because the data degrades every time the image is retouched. This metadata contains information about the image file, such as the camera settings used to capture the image, date and time the image was taken, GPS location data, and more. Data can be added, edited, or removed without affecting the image data. EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) metadata are additional data embodied in digital images by digital cameras,smartphones, tablets, etc. Photo metadata, such as EXIF metadata, is written into a RAW, TIFF, or JPEG file in a data section which sits alongside the image (pixel) data.

Online photo metadata viewer