Auto change 'date taken' without impacting edit history

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
February 20, 2022
2 replies
2085 views

I have a collection with also many older family pictures (dating as far back as around 1900). Obviously, these were originally scanned and imported into my LR Catalog as TIF files.

I have alread renamed the files, using a syntax with the following template (I do that for all my photos/pictures): YYYY MM DD - HHMMSS (with options _## appended).

Obviously, I don't always know when a picture of e.g. a grand - grand parent was taken, so sometimes names look like 1901 _01.TIFF or 1952 01 _06.TIFF.

I edited / improved the files in LR over time.

Now I'd really like to use a filer and e.g. show all pictures that were taken in 1936. Problem is that "Picture Taken" metadata reflects the date the picture was scanned.

I'd like to change that, and that is possible external to LR but that resets the edit history (and I do NOT want that).

Is it possible (e.g. internall with a plug-in or maybe using 'standard functionality' - I'm new and come from LR6, now using the latest LRC) to change this somehow without impacting edit history? Most brilliant would be if the date could be automatically read from my filename somehow.

Any suggestion would be very much appreciated.

Windows

This topic has been closed for replies.

johnrellis

Legend

"if the date could be automatically read from my filename somehow."

I don't know of a plugin that could do this. But if you're technically adept with command-line scripting, you could do this using the free Exiftool utility.

e.j.v92227290Author

Participating Frequently

There is a plug-in actually (from John Beardsworth, called "Capture Time to Exif") but when I played with that maybe a year ago (when I was still using LR6) it appeared that as this method also changes the file from the 'outside' (with Exiftool). LR will flag this and opt to either import the outside metadata change (which destroys my edit info - and that is not what I want) or discard the external info and keep the existing LR metadata (which discards the external date change).

Somehow, the change should be made from unside LR. There's tools like "Search Replace Transfer" (from the same author as mentioned above) that show this is possible but I have yet to find the real solution.

Which amazes me a bit as I'm guessing more LR users work with many scanned and therefore older photos. Wouldn't it be nice than if one could search and filter in LR to e.g. should pictures taken in a certain data-range?

I know: next time I should change that 'date taken' field BEFORE importing into LR... but it's too late now.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

@e.j.v92227290 wrote:

There is a plug-in actually (from John Beardsworth, called "Capture Time to Exif") but when I played with that maybe a year ago (when I was still using LR6) it appeared that as this method also changes the file from the 'outside' (with Exiftool). LR will flag this and opt to either import the outside metadata change (which destroys my edit info - and that is not what I want) or discard the external info and keep the existing LR metadata (which discards the external date change).

Somehow, the change should be made from unside LR. There's tools like "Search Replace Transfer" (from the same author as mentioned above) that show this is possible but I have yet to find the real solution.

Which amazes me a bit as I'm guessing more LR users work with many scanned and therefore older photos. Wouldn't it be nice than if one could search and filter in LR to e.g. should pictures taken in a certain data-range?

I know: next time I should change that 'date taken' field BEFORE importing into LR... but it's too late now.

All these plugins work with EXIF Tools. I'm sure the plugin authors will also explain how to work around the develop metadata issue. What you need to do is use save metadata to file before you run the plugin, so you can use read metadata from file after you ran it.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Lightroom has a built-in option to change the capture date/time. It's under the 'Metadata' menu in the Library module. https://www.lightroomqueen.com/change-exif-dates/

-- Johan W. Elzenga

e.j.v92227290Author

Participating Frequently

On the built-in option, yes, I'm aware of that and I apologize for not indicating this more clearly but that's not a solution as I need to set dates for thousands of files and I don't want to to that manually for all obviously.

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