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Participant
October 26, 2024
Question

Help with Date Metadata in Photos. How to Automate the Process?

  • October 26, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 2026 views

Hi everyone! I'm facing a challenge with managing date metadata in my photos, and I would really appreciate your help.

Context: I started by looking into whether Google Photos could automatically change the capture date in the metadata so I could download the photos and maintain the order in other galleries, like Samsung's. Unfortunately, I found that it can't do this automatically; it only allows me to manually adjust the "creation date" on their platform, not the IPTC or XMP metadata fields where the "capture date" is stored in the photo file.

Now, I’m looking for a way to automate this process. Ideally, I want software that can read the date from the file name and place it in the "capture date" metadata field of each image. Does anyone have experience or advice on how to achieve this? Maybe there’s a tool or script that makes it easy. I'm asking here because perhaps Adobe has already provided a tool for this in their suite, or even Premiere might be able to help.

One of the challenges is that there are different date formats in the file names. For example, some images have the date in the format xx-xx-xx, others just as xxxxxx, and some have screenshot text before the date.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

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1 reply

Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 26, 2024

@Albjav12345 

 

Bridge offers light capabilities to edit the date/time metadata:

 

https://helpx.adobe.com/au/bridge/using/preview-compare-images-bridge.html#:~:text=Bridge%20lets%20you%20change%20the,and%20choose%20Edit%20Capture%20Time.

 

For anything heavier, I would use ExifTool:

 

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=14314.msg77137#msg77137

 

https://exiftool.org/#shift

 

https://exiftool.org/Shift.html

 

It would be helpful if you posted sample images using the different filename formats.

Participant
October 26, 2024

Thank you so much for your response! I swear I've been trying to solve this problem for over a week, searching through forums and even Discord channels.

 

To give you a bit more context: I'm having issues transferring photos from Google Photos to my Samsung gallery. Some images, like TikTok videos or WhatsApp images, don’t have embedded date metadata, so they don’t show up correctly in the Samsung gallery timeline. Google Photos displays them in the correct order by upload date, but when I manually download and transfer them to my phone, this order is lost.

 

I have about a thousand photos, and the file names contain dates in various formats, which makes automation challenging. Examples include: 20181209_151918, download_20180820_165447, IMG-20180815-WA0098, and Screenshot_20221031-092757_One UI Home, among others.

 

Would you mind if I contacted you on Discord to make the communication easier? If not, we can keep chatting here—no worries. Given all this, what would you recommend I do? Thanks again for your help; I really appreciate it!

Participant
October 27, 2024

@Albjav12345 

 

It's a mess with all of those different filename patterns!

 

A couple of random examples using ExifTool:

 

FileName : 2021_03_25_dragon-boy--hielo-y-fuego-17254612.png
FileModifyDate : 2024:10:27 21:38:15+11:00
FileAccessDate : 2024:10:27 21:38:58+11:00
FileInodeChangeDate : 2024:10:27 21:38:56+11:00

 

This first example only appears to have YYYY MM DD info, is this correct?

 

And:

 

FileName : Screenshot_2023-06-12-21-06-22-731_com.google.android.youtube.jpg
FileModifyDate : 2024:10:27 21:40:39+11:00
FileAccessDate : 2024:10:27 21:40:42+11:00
FileInodeChangeDate : 2024:10:27 21:40:41+11:00

 

The second example have both YYYY MM DD and HH MM SS info as well, is this correct?

 

I have applied colour coding to help identify the patterns in the filename and where I believe they should be used in the metadata.

 


Sure! Both examples are right... But what I'm not getting is how I'm gonna be able to automatize all the process with the 1000 photos... I've downloaded the folder of exifTool, but I don't really know how to continue 😞