P: "Data/Time digital" not shown correctly in Lr 3.4

The final release of Lr 3.5 now fixed the issue mentioned above.
Thanks for your work.

Well, wiping XMP-exif may be the technically correct thing to do, but I've lined out a sequence of events where folks can lose data because of it. If LR3.3 didn't map XMP-exif DateTimeDigitized into XMP-xmp CreateDate, for whatever the reason, then a lot can be lost through the upgrade to LR3.4 & MWG 2.0.

This is exactly why it's important to cite exactly which fields you mean!

The XMP-exif copy of the EXIF data has been deprecated as of MWG Guidance 2.0, which was first implemented in LR in version 3.4. So it's no surprise that it gets wiped; in fact it is expected and correct.

John - Yes, in 3.3, the images showed the correct Metadata Panel > Date Time Digitized, but Exiftool showed that CreateDate had been set equal to DateTimeOriginal. So LR3.3 Metadata Panel was correctly showing the DateTimeDigitized that I had set, while internally mapping CreateDate to DateTimeOriginal.

Then, opening the same catalog with 3.5RC (I skipped 3.4), the Metadata Panel > Date Time Digitized value now reflects the incorrect CreateDate that had been created by LR3.3. Further, saving metadata out to the file from 3.5RC will wipe the [XMP-exif]:DateTimeDigitized data from the image, as far as I can tell, for the particular workflow sequence I've described.

This is all listed out above and in the new report I started at your suggestion. If you should feel that my report of the issue is too convoluted, feel free add any comments that may be necessary to help Adobe understand. No hurt feelings here!

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

Thanks! Gary

I haven't tested what happens with catalog migration from 3.3 to 3.5. In your 3.3 catalog, do the images show correct dates in Metadata Panel > Date Time Digitized? if they're correct in 3.3 and incorrect in 3.5RC when opening the very same catalog, that's one sort of issue. But if they're incorrect in 3.3's panel as well, then that suggests another set of issues.

In response to this issue and others, I have posted the following idea: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

John, thanks for the detailed testing!

Regarding the LR3.3 problem, you note "So if you import those files back into LR, they'll get the wrong Date Time Digitized." Actually, all I have to do is open the LR3.3 catalog with 3.5RC, with the images already imported, and incorrect dates are shown in the metadata panel. Then, if we save the metadata back out, with 3.5RC, the [xmp-exif] DateTimeDigitize tag is deleted from the file, and that data appears to be lost. Does your testing confirm that? That may be a real problem for anyone who has autowrite metadata set, and open their earlier catalogs in 3.5RC (same may be true for 3.4).

For myself, I have already run exiftool with DateTimeDigitized>CreateDate, and now 3.5RC appears to be working correctly.

...and the reason I'm so anal about dates/times is that I curate a large catalog of old photos. I've found through bitter experience that almost every tool handles them differently,including Adobe products. The differences are often just simply lack of conformance to any standard but sometimes conformance to a different out-of-date industry standard than the one that previously modified my file.

Alan wrote, " I have never found a complete list of all the flags that exiftool recognizes."

The Exiftool command-line options are documented here:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/e...

If you invoke "exiftool" with no options, it will also print this out.

The names and definitions of all the metadata tags (fields) recognized by Exiftool are documented here:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/e...

Click on any one type (e.g. "EXIF") to see the tags for that type.