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Skidoo100
Participating Frequently
October 22, 2013
Open for Voting

P: Edit Capture Time issue - Need a way to set all photos selected to same date & time

  • October 22, 2013
  • 64 replies
  • 5764 views

Edit Capture Time issue - When I select a number of photos and use "Adjust to a specified date and time", rather than all having the specified date & time they are changed but have different dates & time around what was specified. Have not determined pattern, maybe offset from original date.Windows 7 SP1 64bit, Lightroom 5.2

    64 replies

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    Curt Wrigley
    Curt Wrigley
    Inspiring
    March 13, 2018
    YES; please make this work.  It is so frustrating to not be able to set the capture date to what you want for a batch of photos.  I can see the reason for this batch reference date change.  But more often, I want to batch change photos (scans) to the SAME date.  Its frustrating to have to use another vendor tool to just change the date outside of Lightroom.
      alanterra
      alanterra
      Inspiring
      September 23, 2017
      If you can delete my comments please do so. I'll try to remember to check the original post before commenting in the future. Thanks for the reminder.
      johnrellis
      johnrellis
      Legend
      September 23, 2017
      Alan, Verena's post is 5 years old.  It was just merged into this topic, and unfortunately the forum software doesn't show the original date!
      alanterra
      alanterra
      Inspiring
      September 23, 2017
      Hi Verena. See my and John Ellis's posts in this thread for ways to set the capture date on historical photos.

      Regarding approximate times, it would be nice to have this, but Lightroom needs to be consistent with the available ways to write metadata into photos, and, AFAIK, there is no standard for approximate times. (Just as there also isn't any standard for approximate locations). I use a keyword "± 1 day," "± 1 month;" but I agree that there should be a standard for this. But it isn't just a Lightroom shortcoming.

      A
      F
      FeedbackCommunityMember
      Inspiring
      September 23, 2017



      The lightroom 4 capture adjustment options available are great if you have an actual camera capture time as all photos (though maybe not with the correct date or time) will at least be in chronological order. However, it is not so great when trying to catalog scanned images with only approximate ideas of when the image was captured.

      I've been scanning lots of ancient family photos and am using lightroom 4 to catalog them. For most of these photos I only have vague ideas of when they might have been taken. And hardly any were scanned in a chronological order.

      To be able to view them by capture time in a relatively chronological order lightroom should allow the following:

      A) Incomplete capture times (e.g. if you only know the year and month ... it could be entered e.g. as DD.04.1964 HH:MM:SS) and that way they would be listed either at the beginning or the end of all the april photos of 64)

      B) Batch changes of a single entry (i.e. instead of changing the date & time relative to a chosen photo within a selection, change all the photos in that selection to a specific date/time)

        G
        Adobe Employee
        Ganesh GD
        Adobe Employee
        May 3, 2017
        Thanks for reporting a missing feature. A bug has been reported and we will go through the issue.

        -Ganesh
          G
          Adobe Employee
          Ganesh GD
          Adobe Employee
          May 3, 2017
          Thanks for reporting a missing feature. A bug has been reported and we will go through the issue.

          -Ganesh
          johnrellis
          johnrellis
          Legend
          May 2, 2017
          I think the only way to sort this out is to upload the sample videos, along with any .jpgs in the folder with the same basename, to Dropbox or similar and post the sharing link here. If the issue can be replicated, Adobe may attention.  Otherwise, they're unlikely to pay attention.
          johnrellis
          johnrellis
          Legend
          May 2, 2017
          Separate topic.

          Please reference the new conversation here: Lightroom: Imported video gets capture time from .jpg of same name
          johnrellis
          johnrellis
          Legend
          May 2, 2017
          This issue has an obscure cause: Some cameras generate .jpg "sidecars" for video files, and these sidecars contain a convenient thumbnail (the image in the .jpg) as well as a place to store metadata. So when LR imports x.mov and sees x.jpg in the same folder, it reads all the metadata from the .jpg.  

          I don't think there's an industry standard governing this behavior.  I don't know any recent cameras that generate sidecars with the extension .jpg (Sony cameras generate JPEG sidecars with the extension .thm).

          If you want to catch Adobe's attention on this, I suggest creating a new top-level problem report just on this specific issue.  Make sure to give a step-by-step recipe for how to reproduce the problem.
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