Change to date handling in exiftool to block "00" values

[cjsmall]

I've been using exiftool for years and discovered a recent change to the handling of dates.

I process a lot of scans of old photos and often know only the year or possibly year and month.  I have a script that allows me to specify the known value, say "1946" or 2003:07", and then update the EXIF data with a date string like "1947:00:00" or "2003:07:00" and this has worked great for years.  However, I recently discovered that exiftool is now rejecting the "00" portions of the date and forcing me to specify a "valid" value which is actually unknown and therefore wrong.

I really prefer the old behavior and would like to restore it.  Is there any sort of switch or parameter I can set to allow the entering of "00"?

Thanks.

[StarGeek]

I've been using exiftool for years and discovered a recent change to the handling of dates.

I believe that was with version 12.14, Jan. 6, 2021

Patched to issue warning and avoid writing date/time values with a zero month or day number

You can force exiftool to write any value you want to the EXIF time stamps, such as CreateDate, DateTimeOriginal, and ModifyDate, by using the -n (--printConv) option which would be a global change (and may affect other tags), or on individual tags with the hashtag shortcut.

For example
exiftool -DateTimeOriginal#="2003:07:00 00:00:00" file.jpg

Technically, the EXIF spec calls for blank spaces when a time component isn't known.  So the above should be
exiftool -DateTimeOriginal#="2003:07:    :  :  " file.jpg

[cjsmall]

Thank you for the reply.  I wasn't aware of the "#=" notation.  I modified my scripts to add this and now everything is working again.

I'm currently using version 12:40.  I guess I haven't tried to date many pre-digital scans recently as I had not noticed this issue until a few days ago when I was fixing some historical family photos.