Batch Adjusting the EXIF Time & Date data in your Digital Photos

Olly S — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:35:26 +0000

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.

Tom VD’s Birthday through a Canon F1.4 50mm

Olly S — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 17:20:52 +0000

On Saturday I spent the afternoon with Tom, St. John and Denise travelling over to the huge camera market in Wu Ke Song in the west of the city. The place is amazing, absolutely huge, and with prices supposedly lower than Honk Kong. They have a huge selection of new and second-hand camera equipment ranging from the latest dSLR’s to old Leica’s and box cameras. Stranger still is the fact that they also have stalls selling wedding dresses, makeup and wigs. I’m not sure what level of impulsiveness is required for someone to go shopping for a digital camera and come back with a wedding dress, but it seems that in China your wedding and camera needs are all provided conveniently under one roof. Ah… China. No matter how long you live here there are always new surprises to catch you off guard. Hilarious…

After trying a number of different lenses, I purchased a Canon 50mm F1.4 EF, a very fast lense that lets a lot of light in to the camera. The upshot of this is that you can use it without a flash in low light which enables to you to take more natural photos in these conditions. It is also good for portraits because its depth of field can be used creatively to blur the background of photos. Mastering it is clearly a leaning curve but so far I am really pleased with the results. You can read a review of it here and, if you are interested, it is available from both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Later in the evening, having a spent a few hours in Ditan park with Will playing frisbee, I headed out armed with camera and new lense to celebrate Tom’s birthday. We had an excellent dinner at a new Yunnan restaurant near cafe Sambal in Hou Hai (the name of which currentlly escapes me) before heading off to the Tree in San Li Tun. Supposedly we finished the evening in poachers but my recollection of that part of the evening is a little foggy…. Anyway… Enjoy the pics.

Salted Lolly » Photography

Batch Adjusting the EXIF Time & Date data in your Digital Photos

Tom VD’s Birthday through a Canon F1.4 50mm