problem maniuplating the "date created" field

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problem maniuplating the "date created" field

Postby FastFreddy » Mon Jan 05, 2009 1:20 am

I'm a newbie to this product, so there is apt to be a simple answer to the following. I tried but could not figure out how to get either the EXIF or the timestamp options to work, so that I could change the date created field to the date taken value. I first renamed the file (as the manual advises). Then I tried using Timestamp option to get replace the date created info with the date taken info (this data seems to be valid and is readable within BRU with a right click on the filename. I ended up getting a strange result (date taken was 12/31/1969 - no where near correct!) I had the EXIF option ticked before running the timestamp option. What did I do wrong - should I not have seen the date taken info appear in the date created field of the main screen?
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Re: problem maniuplating the "date created" field

Postby jimwillsher » Mon Jan 05, 2009 8:22 am

If the Date Taken column is blank then BRU has ben unable to extract the EXIF data from your file. it is therefore defaulting to the Epoch (01/0/1970, or in your case a few minutes or hours earlier, depending upon your time zone).

Are you using JPEG files or a different format, and have you edited these files in a different program?



Jim
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Re: problem maniuplating the "date created" field

Postby FastFreddy » Tue Jan 06, 2009 5:20 pm

Thanks for your reply, Jim. I think I'm resolved now wrt the "date created" problem. I dont know what changed, but when I went back to the utility and tried the date feature again, it worked. Thanks to your super utility, I ultimately got out of a sticky situation. We took a 16 day trip to Turkey and took better than 1000 images on 2 different cameras. The plan was to collect the image files into one folder and then choose between the many similar shots. To our horror, we discovered that the time had not been correctly set on one of the cameras. We determined the offset (a bizare 6 hrs 17 minutes - not exactly explained by the time change!) and then I set to work. After some false starts, a plan developed to use your "file taken" feature to use the bad timestamp by itself as the filename, then use a bruteforce method by importing a textfile that would replace the "bad" timestamp characters with "corrected" ones. I chose this direction because 1) it quickly became obvious that I was not going to convince the utility to adjust the timestamp characters as if they were numbers. So the next thing was to build a monster textfile (prepared in Excel) that included a 12character timestamp (YYMMDDHHMMSS) to identify every possible timestamp that the "bad" camera might have recorded on a pic. Naturally, the paired filename in the text file was simply a timestamp offset by 6hrs 15 min. The word "simply" refers to the concept more than the method to create. (If I hadnt gotten tangled up in Excel with timestamp and string manipulation issues, I'd be less tired right now!) Anyway, the bottom line is that we got all pictures synchronized from the 2 cameras, and then relabled with a nice new previx and numbering scheme, and my marriage is saved. And I certainly gave my new pc a workout :D

I guess the point of this diabtribe is to give you enuf sense for my situation so that you might consider adding a potentially life-saving feature for others who could easily have this same problem. If there were a way for you to offer the user a method to offset "file taken" data, it could be a tremendous boost. It would nicely serve even those shooting with one camera that has the timestamp all botched up.

One other question to ask that threw me a bit. I dont know if it is my computer or your utility that can explain this, but for some reason, the "file taken" stamp produced by BRU was 1 hour later than the file taken stamp registered on each image (I'm speaking of the shots from the camera with the correct timestamp). Can you think how this might have happened?? It didnt affect my project above, because the resulting file timestamps were offset by the same hour for pics from either camera, so my offset of 6hr 17min was still correct. But it was a bizare finding...
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Re: problem maniuplating the "date created" field

Postby DBL » Wed Jan 07, 2009 4:26 pm

another newbie here - so I too may have missed how to do this properly !!

similar issue but with new camera and over-eager (aka lazy) eldest son setting date/time a mere 11 months earlier than it should have been. I don't have the problem of filenames BUT I'd like to be able to manipulate the "Taken" date/time and set it to December 25th instead of January 25th. is this achievable ?
cheers,
Dean.
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Re: problem maniuplating the "date created" field

Postby FastFreddy » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:25 pm

Someone else can correct me here if wrong, but what I think you want/need is a program with an interface allowing you to read in and write back out the file taken data of the EXIF portion of the image file. I assume here that the images are jpeg format. If they are raw images, then this data (I believe it is then called xml data resides in an ancillary file. I dont think that BRU's focus is to alter EXIF or xml data, but there are plenty of utilities available that do. one example is Attribute Magic Pro. I have not tried changing the file taken date with this, but I have used it for other purposes, and it does well. If you can be happy enough using the same data taken stamp for many pictures, I suspecct it will greatly reduce your effort. Most probably the date time stamp is comprised of ascii characters and manipulation of these (say "subtracting 11 months) will mean converting the ascii stamp to a number, doing the subtraction, then reconverting to a stamp - this is what I had to do when I needed to manipulate the "date taken" characters in bru. Attribute Magic Pro will easily permit you to write out a given stamp to multiple images - maybe better than not doing anything...
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