I have an unusual date/time skew issue. The clock backup battery in my camera got loose, and so every time I turned on the camera it was reset to 2007:00:00 00:00:00. I took a group of photos in April, 2017, on various dates on a business and vacation trip. I have lots of photos that were timestamped 2007/01/01 and 2007/01/02.
I want to change all dates to the proper 2017 dates and times before I import these photos into Lightroom. I have tried various variations of this command, but none of them succeed.
c:exiftool -AllDates=2007:04:16+12:40:04 -T
c:exiftool "-AllDates=2007:04:16+12:40:04" -T
c:exiftool -AllDates="2007:04:16+12:40:04" -T
Each run results in the --System-- FileModifyDate, FileAccessDate, and FileCreateDate being the current system date and time, in my case 2019/12/25 (because I have timeshifted my system to the timezone where I took the photos, as a sanity check between the subjects and the time of the photo.)
However, using EXIFToolGUI, I can see that the dates in --IFD0-- and --ExifIDF-- are properly changed.
So what am I doing wrong?
My computer experience goes back to the days of CP/M, DOS 2.1, and UNIX System III, so I'm not afraid of a command line, but my command-line skills are rusty now that I use Windows.
If you check the Shortcut tag page (https://exiftool.org/TagNames/Shortcuts.html), you'll see that AllDates is a shortcut for only three tags, DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, and ModifyDate. If you want to set FileCreateDate and FileModifyDate, you'll have to set then specifically. FileAccessDate is not a tag that exiftool can change (see Extra Tags (https://exiftool.org/TagNames/Extra.html)) but it usually is automatically set to one of the other two OS time stamps (can't remember which atm).
See FAQ #5 (https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q5) for how to format time stamps for exiftool.
Stargeek,
Thanks very much. As a new user to exiftool's command line options and to all the different date-related EXIF tags, your explanations helpful and to the point. I appreciate your response.
Can you suggest to Phil Harvey that he create another tag that includes FileCreateDate, FileModifyDate and AllDates.
I wasn't aware that FileAccessDate is read-only, at least in Windows, but I guess I can live with that, as long as I can change the other dates.
Phil
If you set up an example.config file (http://ttps://exiftool.org/config.html) file, you can create one yourself.
Save the file linked above as .exiftool_config in the same directory as exiftool.exe. Open the file in a text editor like notepad (not a word processor). Find this section right near the top of the file
%Image::ExifTool::UserDefined::Shortcuts = (
MyShortcut => ['exif:createdate','exposuretime','aperture'],
MyAlias => 'FocalLengthIn35mmFormat',
);
Add a new line with the name of your short cut and the tags you want to include. For example:
%Image::ExifTool::UserDefined::Shortcuts = (
MyShortcut => ['exif:createdate','exposuretime','aperture'],
MyAlias => 'FocalLengthIn35mmFormat',
MyAllDates => ['FileCreateDate', 'FileModifyDate', 'AllDates'],
);
You can now set FileCreateDate, FileModifyDate , and all the tags included in AllDates in one go.
exiftool -MyAllDates="2007:04:16 12:40:04" /path/to/files
You can even make shortcuts to save on typing. For example, rather than type out HierarchicalSubject every time, I made a shortcut HS
HS=> 'HierarchicalSubject',
Yes, the way to do this is with user-defined tags as StarGeek suggests.
- Phil
Thanks for all the responses.
Phil