Change creation date year for multiple images

[johmura]

Hello,

I have multiple photos that have been imported from a digital camera decade ago, I have recently went through them and noticed that the images are off by 1 year. I had a look at EXIFTool documentation, but I'm not sure how to edit only the year and not change the month, day, hour and minutes for multiple photos at once. I have two cameras of the same model, one of them was set to 2009, and the other is the correct year 2008.

Thanks

[StarGeek]

First run this command to see all the time stamps in the file
exiftool -time:all -g1 -a -s /path/to/file/

Then for each tag that you want to shift by a year, run one of the commands below, replacing TAG with the name of the tag to change.
exiftool -TAG1+="1:0:0 0" -TAG2+="1:0:0 0" /path/to/file/
will add a year
exiftool -TAG1-="1:0:0 0" -TAG2-="1:0:0 0" /path/to/file/
will subtract a year

For example
exiftool -DateTimeOriginal-="1:0:0 0" -CreateDate-="1:0:0 0" File.jpg
will subtract a year from DateTimeOriginal and CreateDate.

[johmura]

Hi Stargeek,

Thanks, I'll try this out.
I have a Mac running on latest MacOS Catalina.

So I'll change "DateTimeOriginal" and "CreateDate" on every image and then remove the rest of the time stamps tags

Here is my time stamps on a image as shown:

— System —
FileModifyDate: 2013
FileAccessDate: 2020
FileInodeChangeDate: 2019

— IFD0 —
ModifiedDate: 2013

— ExifIFD —
DateTimeOriginal: 2009
CreateDate: 2009

— XMP-microsoft —
DateAcquired: 2008

[StarGeek]

So I'll change "DateTimeOriginal" and "CreateDate" on every image

Make sure you're using regular quotes " or '.  Macs have a setting where it will "help" you by turning regular quotes into fancy quotes " "

Also on a Mac, simple commands like these work fine with either double or single quotes, but some of the more advanced commands will require only single quotes.

and then remove the rest of the time stamps tags

The System group of tags can't be removed.  They're part of the underlying OS.  The two you mention are the important ones.