Change relevant timestamp as timeline grouping criterium?

[hscheele]

Hi all,


Regarding the timeline view, I'm trying to figure out how to group picture files exif based (e.g. exif creation date) and not based on file modification date. Reason is, that I re-organized my photo files last year, what means that the mayority of all photos are now related to 2020.

Was expecting a too easy approach for this to touch the community, but still ... I cannot find that out by myself. Can anybody help?

Thanks in advance!

[Mario]

See How IMatch uses Date and Time Information for reference.

IMatch favors "date subject created" over date created, because this is standard and usually the date subject created is more relevant than date created, e.g. when you use scanners or photo editors which set or change date created. For digital camera images, both time stamps are usually identical.

You cannot change which metadata tags IMatch uses to set the global File.DateTime used everywhere and also for the timeline.

If you need to group files by an arbitrary date and time value (or any metadata value at all), create a data-driven category, e.g. with the year value on the first level and the month value on the second level - based on whatever date and time tag you need to analyze.

Your EXIF creation date (when I assume correctly, there are other tags with similar names) is the date mapped into XMP::xmp\CreateDate\CreateDate during ingest. Hence you should use that tag as the base for your data-driven category.

Use these settings for a start (click the attachment below to zoom in):

Date- and time tags are formatted as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. The data driven category uses the first four digits to create a year level, and digit 6 and 7 to create month levels.

[hscheele]

Dear Mario,

Thanks for reply. Took some time to figure out, what you mean, but now i'm more familiar with the Properties pane of the Categories view.

Regarding your example, I'm quite happy with "Exif::Main\36867\DateTimeOriginal\0" instead of "XMP::xmp\CreateDate\CreateDate\0" to define the data-driven levels of the new self-created timeline view.

By the way: As the forum is set with a deactivated "Turn notification on when you post or reply to a topic" by default, I needed to check my post to catch your reply. That the reason why it took some days for my reply. Sorry for that!

// Hartmut