Modify EXIF Date and Time: Change only the Date

[voronwe]

Hi

I would like to ask whether it is possible to change only the Date of a File and leave the time as it is:

Reason behind: I have a lot of pictures which are scanned. I know the date when they were taken, but not the time.
With the current IMatch5, if I select more than one file and set "Modify EXIF Date and Time" to absolute, all of these files will get the same Date and Time.
However, I would like to leave the time as it is because of sorting reasons (they are scanned in the correct order allready) and use this tool only to fastly change the date

[Mario]

This seems not to be possible with ExifTool, at least I did not find a trick, not even from the command line (aka ExifTool command processor in IMatch).
This is why IMatch does not support it.

[jch2103]

You can change just the date for individual files, of course, using an appropriate metadata panel, but that gets quite tedious with more than a few files.

I had the same kind of issue with some of my scanned images, and developed a somewhat awkward workaround. My scanned files have names generated by the scanning program (VueScan) that include scanned dates and sequence numbers. I wanted to use this to load scanned dates into the digitized date metatdata field.

I had to rename the files to create four-digit years (default was two-digit), and change the sequence numbers to an hour/minute type format (e.g., 'Scan-120429-0072.jpg' became 'Scan-20120429-0102.jpg'). (I used the free Bulk Rename Utility for the file renaming.) I was then able to use the ExifTool Command Processor to load the file name information into the digitized date metadata field:

Code Select Expand

-createdate<{File.FullName}
{Files}

Not too pretty, but it did what I needed.

If you try this, be aware that date/time metadata fields have overlapping and confusing names. (Metadata is a mess!) Picking the correct one for your use may involve some trial and error.

[hluxem]

The way I deal with scanned images as well as with other media files is to add a date and time value with a script. I usually start with 0:00:00 for time and increment the time for each file. That way the images and videos will be sorted the correct way for the time line view. I usually don't take pictures at midnight, so having the "wrong" time doesn't matter.
And yes, meta data is a mess, too many fields/tags for time, some of them exif tool only writes to for image files and not for non image files. Formatting is important too, some fields accept either date with or without time, some fields require date, time and time zone. And on top of this, the tag names seemed to be changing on me, the script I used pre public beta requires a slightly different tag name now.

I had several thousand movie clips with the date and time encoded in the name. I used a script to extract the time value and write the correct time value to the meta data tag with Imatch 5.   

Heiner

[Gerd]

Hi,

I use FastStone via Favorites-panel to change only the date.

Regards
Gerd

[voronwe]

I use FastStone via Favorites-panel to change only the date.

Yes, Faststone does it : Tools -> Change Timestamp

Thanks a lot for this information. Maybe I should Faststone a try again as a third Image-viewer on mya PC (besides Irfanview and XnView)

@Mario: Just a short question: Which of the lot of Dates in the Exif is IMatch using for the Timeline?

[Ferdinand]

The help file page for the timeline says:

When indexing a file, IMatch extracts the date and time the file was created. This timestamp is stored in the database and used for the timeline and a variety of other purposes. You can access this timestamp via the corresponding File Window Attribute and the {File.DateTime} variable.

To extract the creation timestamp, IMatch probes different metadata tags. Depending on the file format, IMatch looks at the ExifTool Date/Time composite tags, the appropriate EXIF date and time information, XMP, classic IPTC, PDF, Office and MP3 date and time metadata. If no usable date and time information can be extracted from a file, IMatch uses the last modified date and time as reported by Windows.

[Says he who yesterday asked a question that was already answered in the help file.]