Jason Dunn
09-30-2006, 05:43 PM
Having returned from Thailand this week with 3500 or so photos, I'm undergoing an intense culling process (http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,9740) that has the total down to 1500 or so now (many more to go). A particular problem has cropped up though, and it's one I've seen before: I neglected to update the clocks on my two digital cameras (Nikon D200, Casio S500) to the appropriate time zone settings at each location I landed at. I'm a big stickler for having accurate time stamp information, because to me it's part of the context of the photo and quite important. Sadly, I'm in "time stamp hell" at the moment. I had hoped it would be an easy matter of using ACDSee Pro to select my photos and shift the EXIF date by "x" hours, but it's proving to be more complex then that.
First, because the clocks were out of sync on each camera to begin with, sorting through the images based on EXIF time stamp is confusing. I'm also having trouble with ACDSee Pro and time stamps - there must be bugs in their software, because when I select an image, and tell it to change the EXIF time stamp to match the file creation date, it processes the file but nothing changes. 8O I'm going to install ACDSee 9 to see if it works any better. Even when the time stamp changing process does work, I have to repeat it three times: once for the EXIF change, once for file date creation, and once for the last modified file date. There's no way to change the EXIF Camera Date/Time and EXIF Digitized Date/Time other than manually. I've suggested to ACDSee that a one-click "time travel" feature would be great for their program: a simple interface that would allow you to change every aspect of a file's date stamp, all at once. I know it would sure save me time!
ACDSee Pro also has no capability to change the creation date stamp of video files taken with my Casio S500, so I had to do some research and look for a utility to do that. I found one called Attribute Magic (http://www.attributemagic.com/products.html), and there's a freeware version that while simple, does the trick. It's a slow process though - I have to change each video time stamp one at a time, and I can't do that until I get all my pictures sorted out. And to think that if I had only updated the time zone settings on each camera, I wouldn't have to do this...
First, because the clocks were out of sync on each camera to begin with, sorting through the images based on EXIF time stamp is confusing. I'm also having trouble with ACDSee Pro and time stamps - there must be bugs in their software, because when I select an image, and tell it to change the EXIF time stamp to match the file creation date, it processes the file but nothing changes. 8O I'm going to install ACDSee 9 to see if it works any better. Even when the time stamp changing process does work, I have to repeat it three times: once for the EXIF change, once for file date creation, and once for the last modified file date. There's no way to change the EXIF Camera Date/Time and EXIF Digitized Date/Time other than manually. I've suggested to ACDSee that a one-click "time travel" feature would be great for their program: a simple interface that would allow you to change every aspect of a file's date stamp, all at once. I know it would sure save me time!
ACDSee Pro also has no capability to change the creation date stamp of video files taken with my Casio S500, so I had to do some research and look for a utility to do that. I found one called Attribute Magic (http://www.attributemagic.com/products.html), and there's a freeware version that while simple, does the trick. It's a slow process though - I have to change each video time stamp one at a time, and I can't do that until I get all my pictures sorted out. And to think that if I had only updated the time zone settings on each camera, I wouldn't have to do this...