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_Jake_Belouve_
Participant
March 24, 2006
Question

Incorrect date/time formatting

  • March 24, 2006
  • 4 replies
  • 1540 views
When I attempt to read any time related metadata say, "exif:DateTimeOriginal" (it also happens with pretty much any other XMP Date field), the formatting is completely different from what the XMP specification indicates. I get something like "mm/dd/yyyy, hh:mm:ss". There is no time zone.

The XMP specification indicates that dates should be in W3C format (a subset of ISO 8601).

I know the date metadata is correctly embedded in the image files because if I export the metadata using Bridge, it is displayed in W3C format (including the time zone). Perhaps the date metadata isn't being put into the thumbnail cache correctly?

Is there a way to extract the date in W3C format without having to parse it? I also need the timezone.

Thanks!
Jake
This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

Varun Varshney
Adobe Employee
Varun Varshney
Adobe Employee
October 15, 2018

Hi All,

We have released a new version of Adobe Bridge (CC 2019) on 15th October 2018. The new version build number is 9.0.0.204. This version is available to install via Adobe Creative Cloud application.

This Bridge update contains support for editing capture time of images (https://helpx.adobe.com/bridge/using/preview-compare-images-bridge.html#Edittheimagecapturetime).

Please check following link to know about all new features in Adobe Bridge CC 2019 - https://helpx.adobe.com/bridge/using/whats-new.html

You may need to update the Creative Cloud application and restart your computer to see the updated installer.

Thanks,

Varun Varshney

R
rmrubin
Known Participant
May 5, 2022

It is most interesting to learn that this discussion has been going for 16 years. I discovered the problem only recent in trying to use Edit Capture Time to change the time on images taken on trip to California when I forgot to reset my camera. When I tried to merge the pictures on a Google Drive with pictures taken by another person on the same trip with a cell phone, the times did not match up. Photos taken at the same time did not appear together. Those pictures I had reset using Edit Capture Time had the time offset of my computer (Central Daylight Time), but the time shown was the Pacific Daylight Time. JPGs subsequently created from raw images had no UTC offset specified. Although they had the correct Pacific Time, they appeared to be at UTC +0.00.

Would it be too much to have Bridge (and maybe Lightroom too) add a setting of the time zone to Edit Capture Time? You can use a tool like Geosetter to  change the time zone, but that is hardly convenient.

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    _David_E__Franzen_
    Participating Frequently
    March 31, 2006
    Whoops -- "exif:DateTimeCreated" was a typo. I meant DateTimeOriginal.

    Thanks for the feedback,
    David
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    _Jake_Belouve_Author
    Participant
    March 24, 2006
    Thanks for the information David. It's too bad Bridge doesn't provide a mechanism to obtain it. I'm probably going to retrieve XMP metadata using my own XMP library rather than through Bridge. Pity.

    My objective is to retrieve the UTC offset along with the rest of the information. A Javascript Date object would be best as long as it contained the UTC offset.

    I understand that EXIF doesn't include UTC offsets, but Adobe Bridge apparently uses the current system UTC offset when writing the XMP metadata. As long as I set my camera clock and laptop timezone to match the local time, the UTC offset will be valid.

    Additionally, EXIF will include UTC offset or time zone information in the future, so people are going to want to obtain this functionality at some point anyway.

    What is exif:DateTimeCreated? I couldn't find it anywhere in the XMP spec.
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    _David_E__Franzen_
    Participating Frequently
    March 24, 2006
    Jake,

    When you access a known date-type property through scripting, Bridge hands back a string formatted as it appears in the user interface. There is no way to get back the ISO 8601 String via Bridge scripting.

    If you could change the way Bridge worked in this respect, which would you prefer and why: getting back the ISO 8601 string or getting back a JavaScript Date object?

    You should be aware, however, that in the case of exif:DateTimeCreated and DateTimeDigitized the "time zone" (strictly speaking this is a UTC offset and not a time zone) should be ignored. It has no meaning for those EXIF values. The native EXIF tags for these properties only hold dates and times but no UTC offsets. The UTC offset is just there in the XMP Date value because a UTC offset is always part of an XMP date-time. There's no way to ever know the correct UTC offset for the date since it's not recorded in EXIF.

    -David Franzen
    Bridge Quality Engineer
    Adobe Systems, Inc.
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