Fixing the date and time format - Samsung NX300

Started by MrBeng, December 14, 2013, 10:23:26 AM

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MrBeng

Hi Phil,

First of all, thanks for creating this powerful tool. 8)

I am using ExifTool 9.42 with Mac OSX 10.8.5. I have a problem with the date/time format generated by my camera and I think I might have found a way to fix it using ExifTool but before I batch apply it to 2000+ photos, I just want to make sure it is indeed the solution that would work.

Problem:
Samsung NX300 camera has a known issue of generating incorrect EXIF date/time format "YYYY:mm:dd:HH:MM:SS". The colon between "dd" and "HH" made iPhoto not able to read the date/time correctly. The latest camera firmware update has fixed this problem but I have 2000 photos taken with the wrong date/time format before the camera firmware was updated.

Printing AllDates from original jpg:
exiftool -AllDates Picture.jpg
Date/Time Original              : 2013:08:24:19:03:31
Create Date                     : 2013:08:24:19:03:31
Modify Date                     : 2013:08:24:19:03:31


Modifying -AllDates of original jpg, based on an example shown in ExifTool FAQ:
exiftool '-AllDates<DateTimeOriginal' Picture.jpg
Warning: [minor] Overlapping MakerNotes values - Picture.jpg
Warning: [minor] Overlapping MakerNotes values - Picture.jpg
    1 image files updated


Printing AllDates from modified jpg:
exiftool -AllDates Picture.jpg
Date/Time Original              : 2013:08:24 19:03:31
Create Date                     : 2013:08:24 19:03:31
Modify Date                     : 2013:08:24 19:03:31


Now iPhoto reads the date/time of the modified jpg correctly. There are however two warnings shown during the modification, as you can see in the exiftool output above. What are those warnings for? What do they mean? and do I need to be worried?

cheers,
Anthony

Phil Harvey

Hi Anthony,

Interesting.  I have a sample NX300 image here and it doesn't have the extra colon between the date and time.  It does have the overlapping makernotes values though.  Unfortunately, Samsung is very inconsistent in their maker notes, and they contain many formatting errors.  It is likely that some maker note information will be lost when writing these images, but it is hard to say what because so little of the Samsung maker notes has been decoded.  For my sample, even the tags currently extracted from the maker notes for this model doen't seem to be decoded properly:

> exiftool ../pics/SamsungNX300.jpg -makernotes:all
Maker Note Version              : 0100
Picture Wizard Mode             : Standard
Picture Wizard Color            : 0
Picture Wizard Saturation       : -4
Picture Wizard Sharpness        : -4
Picture Wizard Contrast         : -4
Camera Temperature              : undef C
Firmware Name                   :


But what you have done to fix the date/time tags will work.  To be more technically correct, I would recommend the following command because it handles the case where the date/time tags may be different (in practice they may only be different for original images from your camera under some very particular conditions, like in-camera edited images):

exiftool -tagsfromfile @ -alldates Picture.jpg

- Phil
...where DIR is the name of a directory/folder containing the images.  On Mac/Linux/PowerShell, use single quotes (') instead of double quotes (") around arguments containing a dollar sign ($).

MrBeng

Thanks Phil. It works. ;)

Perhaps the sample you have was taken after the firmware update?

I have added two more assignments to the command line to have the filemodifydate match the corrected dates, and remove the original file (already backed up my photos of course).

Now it looks like this:
exiftool -tagsfromfile @ -alldates '-filemodifydate<datetimeoriginal' -overwrite_original DIR

Works like a charm.

A lot of NX300 user has been bothered by this issue for a while now and so far I haven't found any solution on the net beside this one.

Again, thanks for this wonderful tool and your constant maintenance and support.  :)