Have you ever had the problem of going on holiday to a different time zone, and on your return discovering that you forgot to set your digital camera to the local time in the country you visited? This can be be irritating especially if you wish to combine your photos with those of a friend or familly member who was also on the trip – it is impossible to put them all together in chronological order. Having spent the last few months going through my old photos and uploading them to the web, I have encountered this problem with several batches of photos on my machine, so I did some research on the web to find a tool that could help me fix the problem. There are plenty of tools online that allow you to edit the time data of an image, but to edit each photo individually would take forever when you have 100 photos – what is needed is a tool to process a batch of images at once, automatically add/subtract each picture’s time taken/digitized by the difference in the time zones, e.g. adding 1 hour to each picture.
The best tool I found for the job is called Exifer, is free, and can be downloaded here. To adjust your photos here’s what you need to do:
1. First of all create a new folder and put a copy of all the photos you wish to change inside it – it is better to work from a backup copy in case something goes wrong.
2. Installer Exifer and run it. Browse to the folder containing the photos.
3. Select all the photos by Ctrl-A then right-click on an image and go to ‘EXIF/IPTC’ and click on ‘Edit’.
4. Click the ‘EXIF data’ tab at the top of the window that opens. The click the ‘Date tab below it.
5. Tick the box next to where it says ‘Incremental (formore than one selected image)
6. You can then specify the number of days/hours/minutes to adjust all your photos by. Select the amount using the drop down menu and click okay to adjust your photos.
7. Check the photos carefully before deleting the originals.
There are times that the EXIF data may be corrupted meaning that you can no longer change the data but generally this should work without any problems.
See Also…
You my also find these tools useful:
World-Wide Media eXchange – This tool will not only let you adjust the time and date of photos, but also let you add the geographic location where they were shot.
Exiv2 – Exiv2 is a command-line only EXIF and LPTC manipulation tool. Download it here. You can adjust the time and date of a group of photos by running it from the command line. Something like:
exiv2.exe -a-3 *.jpg
to adjust the Exif times in the images by -3 hours. See the output of exiv2 -h or visit this page for more details.
