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

[Skidoo100]

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

[johnrellis]

That's right. When you apply Metadata > Edit Capture Time to a number of photos, the corrected time is applied to the most selected photo, and the dates of all the other photos are adjusted by the same amount. This is described at the top of the command window:



You could use the Capture Time To Exif plugin to set all the photos to have the same date/time:

http://photographers-toolbox.com/prod...

[johnrellis]

Also, I agree that LR should have an option on Edit Capture Time that sets the capture time of all photos to the same date/time.

[johnrellis]

Other requests for this functionality:

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

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

[bob frost]

Yes, I have to use ExifToolGUI for this. I'm adding dates to re-photographed transparencies. I may know the date, but not the time. In LR I have to invent different times for each image - so no good for batches.

Bob Frost

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The 'edit capture time' behavior discussed in http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh... is counter intuitive and is a royal pain for us folk using non digital source images where the capture time is only known to a day or month or less accuracy. Not having flickr-style range dates is a root issue but the 'edit capture time' setting should IMHO do what it is told - set all photos to a specified time.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lightroom 3.4.1 running on Win XP/SP3.

Error when selecting a group of photos in the grid view and then Metadata-->Edit Capture Time.

The capture time is only updated for some of the photos, and the remaining photos' capture times are either unchanged or changed to an unpredictable date/time. Changing metadata for photos individually works fine.

[christianb50221146]

changing date taken with many pictures selected doesnt work correct. If the active pic has the wanted date, selecting "setting time" (first option) and clicking "changing all" does nothing. If you give another date, only some pic changes the date!! (Lightroom 6.3, no cloud version"

[Califdan2]

I scan some old film images to my Hard Drive, as Jpg's then import them with LR CC 2015.5.  At this stage the metadata panel shows no dates or times.   I then select several of the scanned images and use the Metadata -> Edit Capture time menu, select "Adjust to a Specific Date/Time" and key in a a specific date & time in the "Corrected Time" box and click "Change All".  

What I expect, is that all the selected images will be set to the date/time I typed in.  But, this is not what happens.  What happens is that the active image gets the typed in date and time but the other images get a similar, but different date time.  

For example, The file time on the scanned image A is 5/9/2016 6:42 pm and the file on img B is 5/9/2016 6:44 pm.  Then in LR I import these two images using the move option and a file rename preset.  When the import is done, the moved files have the same file date/time as before the move however the metadata in LR does not show any date fields (I have EXIF and IPTC view selected).  
Now I select both images with the first one being the active image, go to menu  Metadata -> Edit Capture time.  In the dialog that comes up I select "Adjust to a specific date and time", I fill in 10/15/1984 2:00:00 pm and click the "Change All" button.  Now in LR, there are two dates showing for each image.  The first image (which was the active image when I did the date change) has 10/15/1984 2:00:00 pm for both the "Date Time Original" and "Date Time" metadata fields as expected.  However, the 2nd image has 10/15/1984 2:01:39 pm for those two fields.  In other words the 2nd images' time is 1 minute and 39 seconds later than the date time I typed in.  

This is not what the text "Adjust to a Specific Date/time" implies should happen.

[johnrellis]

See my reply at the top of this topic: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/edit_capture_time_issue_need_a_way_to_set_all...

[alanterra]

Edit Capture Time used to work (at least, I remember it working). Now it seems to be completely broken. Even if I click "Adjust to a specified date and time", it adjusts all the photos relative to their current dates, which is completely wrong, and very frustrating.

Here are two photos that were taken in May, 1925. One of them has the wrong date.
I try to adjust the dates of both of them

and afterwards, Lightroom has marked one as having been taken in the 19th century

I have run into many issues with setting the dates for historical photos, but I thought I had figured this out. (It would be nice if Lightroom had the facility to set the XMP metadata that correspond to the date of the image vs. the date that this copy was made, but I have never been able to make that work). But at a minimum, Edit Capture Time "Adjust to a specified date and time" really should work correctly. Otherwise you have to edit each photo, and you cannot copy and paste into this dialog.

[johnrellis]

In the original thread, Tom Mickow wrote:

Lr only adjusts the most selected image to the exact date & time you set.  All the other images that are selected aren't set to that exact date, they're adjusted by the same amount.  In your example, setting your most selected image to a date in 1925 date changed it by 86 odd years, so all the other selected images changed by that same amount.  It's been that way as long as I can remember.

If you'd like to have another option that allows you to set all the selected images to the exact same date & time, I'd look for another post on the subject and vote for that feature request.  It's been requested a number of times over the years and I definitely agree that it would be nice to have.

If/when I need to do it, I use the ExifTool utility by Phil Harvey.  I'm pretty sure there are also some plugins that accomplish the task, although I don't know any names off hand.

[johnrellis]

See this earlier reply for a plugin that can set all the photos to the same date and time: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/edit_capture_time_issue_need_a_way_to_set_all...

[alanterra]

Thanks, John. I know how to use ExifTool, but I am always (always!) confused by the large number of date fields, and never can remember which fields Lightroom uses and what it calls them internally. I have many times changed various date/time fields using ExifTool, and then found that they didn't have the desired effect in Lightroom. 

I thought that by using Lightroom's dialog I could set the dates, but I see that it isn't even designed to do what I need (in spite of the label "Adjust to a specified date and time.")

I'll review my notes and try again. Sigh...

PS--I do have your plugin, so I'll give that a try next.

[johnrellis]

The plugin that's most relevant here is Capture Time To Exif, which makes it easy to set the capture time of a batch of photos all to the same date.

[alanterra]

Thanks, John

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I am experiencing similar issue in LR 6.10 when applying "Adjust to a specific data and time" to a selection of photo. Only the frist 2 or 3 of the selection are modified tothe correct date, than the other ones are modified to "random dates".
Very poor behavior for a very basic fucntion.

[alanterra]

Are you sure that they are random? The discussion above notes that they are set as offsets from the current date. This confused me too.

[alanterra]

I have made a separate post (which I hope is not merged into this thread), which explains how I set the capture time of batches of photos.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

LR recently updgraded to 6.10 created issues when importing videos : Videos capture time are not correct in LR while they are correct in the windows explorer.
I tried to use "Metada -> Modify capture time" option, but experience an issue : 
When I select several videos, it modifies correctly only the two first vdeos of the selection. The other videos capture dates are also modified but to "random dates" (!)

[johnrellis]

Regarding Metadata > Edit Capture Time, see this reply earlier in this topic: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/edit_capture_time_issue_need_a_way_to_set_all...

[johnrellis]

"Videos capture time are not correct in LR while they are correct in the windows explorer."

LR has numerous problems with video metadata, and there are existing topics in this forum for them.  If you describe in detail the symptoms you're seeing, including the date/time you see in LR and the date you see in Explorer, we can point you to the right topic.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hello, Thanks for your reply. Here are details. Let's take example of video file IMG_1984.MOV. file was imported by LR from an iPhone to the LR catalog and copied on folder P:/photos/iphone on my laptop Hard drive.

In windows : "Modified = 14/04/2017" (which is the capture date) "Created = 15/04/2017" (which is the date the file was copied on the laptop hard drive)
in Lightroom : "Capture date = 15/10/2013"

Now, I notice the following : in the same catalog and same folder there is a picture with the following filename : IMG_1984.JPG  and this picture cature date is... 15/10/2013.  So it sounds like, when importing the video, LR took the capture date if the Image with same filename. It is a strange behavior from LR. If LR does not consider extensions, than it should have been identified as a duplicate when importing.... 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hello Alan, 
Let's take an example : I am selecting 6 vicdeos in my catalog. All of them have a capture date of "17/02/2013" (Which was an error from lightroom when importing).
In the dialog box "Adjust to a specific date and time" I select "set specific time and date" option, than I specify the following date : "22/01/2017 11:0:00" and apply to the selection.
Result : the first 4 pictures capture date are now "22/01/2017 11:14:50" (good date, wrong time !) and the last 2 pictures have "24/01/2017 09:13:01" so a "random" offset...

[alanterra]

Hi OlivierA. You are now talking about adjusting the time for videos, and this thread was started to talk about adjusting the time for photos. There are different bugs and limitations for these two cases, and I only (perhaps) understand the issues for photos. Your comment above that I responded to mentions "photos"--if you meant "videos" please ignore anything I said because it is likely to not apply. Wish I could help.

[johnrellis]

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.